Spreadsheets with a Semantic Layer
Andrea E. Kohlhase, Michael Kohlhase · 2013
Abstract: Spreadsheets are active documents that are heavily employed in adminis-tration, financial forecasting, education, and science because of their intuitive, flex-ible, and direct approach to computation. But they are also error-prone, poorly documented, often contain actual data in legacy form. Therefore, assistance for high-impact spreadsheet users is needed. To determine what kind of help could be useful, we analyze user expectations with an “Wizard-of-Oz ” experiment. This shows that background knowledge is missing in spreadsheets. In the SACHS project we approach the missing background knowledge by adding a semantic layer. We illustrate spreadsheets with a semi-formal domain ontology and equip them with a semantically transparent interface that allows new forms of interaction like “semantic navigation”, “framing”, or “playing with variants”, on which a survey is given. Moreover, an integration of assessment knowledge into the SACHS approach is presented. We model it based on theory graphs and sketch a potential SACHS extension with innovative assessment interaction.