Hostname: page-component-669899f699-vbsjw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-05-06T11:14:25.065Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Adding deductive logic to a COTS spreadsheet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2007

MARCELO TALLIS ,
RAND WALTZMAN  and
ROBERT BLAZER
MARCELO TALLIS
Affiliation:
4640 Admiralty Way, Suite 1010, Marina del Rey, CA 90292, USA; e-mail: mtallis@teknowledge.com, rand@nada.kth.se,balzer@teknowledge.com
RAND WALTZMAN
Affiliation:
4640 Admiralty Way, Suite 1010, Marina del Rey, CA 90292, USA; e-mail: mtallis@teknowledge.com, rand@nada.kth.se,balzer@teknowledge.com
ROBERT BLAZER
Affiliation:
4640 Admiralty Way, Suite 1010, Marina del Rey, CA 90292, USA; e-mail: mtallis@teknowledge.com, rand@nada.kth.se,balzer@teknowledge.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We exploit the spreadsheet metaphor to make deductive problem-solving methods available to the vast population of spreadsheet end-users. In particular, we show how the function-based problem-solving capabilities of spreadsheets can be extended to include logical deductive methods in a way that is consistent with the existing spreadsheet ‘look and feel’. The foundation of our approach is the integration of a standard deductive logic system into a successful Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) spreadsheet. We have demonstrated this by designing and implementing an extension to Excel that manages the integration of Excel and a deductive logic engine based on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard ontology language OWL + SWRL.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Knowledge Engineering Review , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , September 2007 , pp. 255 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Boehm, B., Horowitz, E., Madachy, R., Reifer, D., Clark, B. K., Steece, B., Winsor Brown, A., Chulani, S. and Abts, C. 2000 Software Cost Estimation with COCOMO II. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR.Google Scholar
Horrocks, I., Patel-Schneider, P. F., Boley, H., Tabet, S., Grosof, B., and Dean, M. 2004 SWRL: A Semantic Web Rule Language Combining OWL and RuleML. W3C Member Submission. Available at www.w3.org/Submission/SWRL/.Google Scholar
KAON2—Ontology Management for the Semantic Web. Project homepage. Available at www.kaon2.semanticweb.org/Google Scholar
Kriwaszek, F. 1988 LogiCalc—A PROLOG Spreadsheet. In Michie, D., Hayes, J. and Richards, J. (eds.), Machine Intelligence, 11 pp. 193–208, Oxford University Press, Inc.Google Scholar
McGuinness, D. L. and van Harmelen, F (ed.). 2004 OWL Web Ontology Language Overview. W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004. Available at www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-features-20040210/.Google Scholar
Nardi, B. 1993 A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing. Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Nuñez, F. 2000 An extended spreadsheet paradigm for data visualization systems and its implementation. Masters Thesis, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Cape Town.Google Scholar
RuleML Hompeage. Available at www.ruleml.org/.Google Scholar
Spenke, M. and Beilken, C. 1989 A spreadsheet interface for logic programming. In Bice, K. & Lewis, C. (eds.), Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Wings for the Mind, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA pp. 75–80.Google Scholar
SweetRules Project Home Page. Available at www.sweetrules.projects.semwebcentral.orgGoogle Scholar