Abstract
Although extracting information from tables is essential for Internet information agents, most tables are designed for human eyes and their layout and semantic meanings are not well defined. In practice, encoding the layout of each information source is impossible. This work presents a novel semantic search approach capable of extracting information from general tables. Semantic ontology allows our agents to read tables in the same knowledge domain with different layouts. In addition, a system of layout syntax and a set of transformation rules are defined to transform tables into databases without losing their semantic meanings.