Compensating the Semantic Bias of Spreadsheets.
Andrea E. Kohlhase, Michael Kohlhase · 2008
Spreadsheets are heavily employed in ad-ministration, financial forecasting, education, and science because of their intuitive, flexible, and direct approach to computation. They represent examples for “active documents” which are considered very worthwhile in the field of Knowledge Management. But these activity traits also lead to usability and main-tenance problems, as spreadsheet-based ap-plications grow evermore complex and long-lived. We argue that these difficulties come from a fundamental bias of spreadsheets to-wards computational aspects of the concep-tual models underlying the applications, i.e., a semantic bias. Concretely, we present the software architecture of the SACHS project geared towards a semantic enhancement of MS Excel spreadsheets that aims at compen-sating this semantic bias.