Design and implementation of queries for model-driven spreadsheets

This paper presents a domain-specific querying language for model-driven spreadsheets. We briefly show the design of the language and present in detail its implementation, from the denormalization of data and translation of our user-friendly query language to a more efficient query, to the execution of the query using Google. To validate our work, we executed an empirical study, comparing QuerySheet with an alternative spreadsheet querying tool, which produced positive results

A Knowledge Transfer Partnership - the development of a Bespoke Enterprise Resource Planning System in the UK

Abstract. A Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) is a UK-wide programme designed to enable businesses to improve their competitiveness, productivity and performance. A KTP achieves this through the forming of a Partnership between a business and an academic institution. The aim is to enable businesses to access skills and expertise from academics and embed this knowledge in their businesses in order to develop the business. The knowledge sought is embedded into the business through a project, or projects, undertaken by a recently qualified person (known as the Associate). Part funding is provided by the government towards the Associate’s salary and towards the release of an Academic supervisor who works a half a day a week at the company. KTPs can vary in length from 6 months to three years, depending on the needs of the business and the desired outcomes. Therefore a KTP enables new capability to be embedded into the business and has benefited and continues to benefit a wide range of businesses across many sectors in the UK, including micro sized, small and large businesses across many sectors. This paper describes a Knowledge Transfer Partnership project between the University of Hertfordshire and a small and medium sized enterprise (SME) based in Cambridgeshire, UK.Final Accepted Versio

The Design and Implementation of a bespoke Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP) for an acoustical engineering company

This paper will describe the tasks completed so far as part of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership between the University of Hertfordshire and Acoustical Control Engineers (ACE) a ‘small and medium sized enterprise’ (SME) based in Cambridgeshire, UK. ACE’s 25 personnel design, manufacture and install noise and vibration control systems to solve a wide range of acoustic problems. The projects undertaken include acoustic enclosures for supermarket refrigeration plant and for generators used in many situations, together with other more diverse applications such as controlling noise in the workplace and even on a luxury boat. Before the current KTP project the company used some partially computerised systems consisting of spreadsheets to perform acoustic analyses, pricing and project management functions supplemented with a paper based system to ‘fill the gaps’. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems provide an integrated database for all parts of the organisation allowing decisions to be based on a complete understanding of the organisation’s information, avoiding the problems due to duplication of data and ensuring that the consequences of decisions in one part of the organisation are reflected in the planning and control systems of the rest of the organisation. ERP systems became popular from the 1990’s mainly in relatively large organisations due to the complexity and cost of these systems. This project is unusual in that rather than adapting an off-the-shelf ERP solution to ACE’s very specific and specialised requirements we are taking an ERP development approach in an SME whose legacy systems are made up of spreadsheet and paper based systems. For the software development an Agile approach has been used. Agile involves software development methods based on iterative and incremental development. The initial attempt was to start developing the ERP from an Open Source ERP Source Code; however this effort was futile as a result of the bespoke nature of ACE’s business and product lines. Mapping ACE’s data model to the database which any existing ERP system could be adapted to, proved to be a very difficult problem. Therefore, developing the ERP from first principles was inevitable. Several of the ERP modules have been developed, user training has taken place and the core modules have been signed off. The project is due to complete in September 2014 and by this time we will have further information on how the ERP system has increased the competitiveness of the company, as well as experience of introducing an ERP into an SME. However, as would be expected the work undertaken developing the system so far has had several significant effects on ACE and acted as a catalyst for change in various parts of ACE’s business.Non peer reviewe

GEORDi: Supporting lightweight end-user authoring and exploration of Linked Data

The US and UK governments have recently made much of the data created by their various departments available as data sets (often as csv files) available on the web. Known as ”open data” while these are valuable assets, much of this data remains useless because it is effectively inaccessible for citizens to access for the following reasons: (1) it is often a tedious, many step process for citizens simply to find data relevant to a query. Once the data candidate is located, it often must be downloaded and opened in a separate application simply to see if the data that may satisfy the query is contained in it. (2) It is difficult to join related data sets to create richer integrated information (3) it is particularly difficult to query either a single data set, and even harder to query across related data sets. (4) To date, one has had to be well versed in semantic web protocols like SPARQL, RDF and URI formation to integrate and query such sources as reusable linked data. Our goal has been to develop tools that will let regular, non-programmer web citizens make use of this Web of Data. To this end, we present GEORDi, a set of integrated tools and services that lets citizen users identify, explore, query and represent these open data sources over the web via Linked Data mechanisms. In this paper we describe the GEORDi process of authoring new and translating existing open data in a linkable format, GEORDi’s lens mechanism for rendering rich, plain language descriptions and views of resources, and the GEORDI link-sliding paradigm for data exploration. With these tools we demonstrate that it is possible to make the Web of open (and linked) data accessible for ordinary web citizen users

Graphical querying of model-driven spreadsheets

This paper presents a graphical interface to query modeldriven spreadsheets, based on experience with previous work and empirical studies in querying systems, to simplify query construction for typical end-users with little to no knowledge of SQL. We briefly show our previous text based model-driven querying system. Afterwards, we detail our graphical model-driven querying interface, explaining each part of the interface and showing an example. To validate our work, we executed an empirical study, comparing our graphical querying approach to an alternative querying tool, which produced positive results.(undefined

Translating SQL to Spreadsheet: A Survey

Spreadsheets are the most popular and conventionally databases in use today. Since Spreadsheets are visual and expression based languages, research into the features of spreadsheets is therefore a highly relevant topic to study. Spreadsheet can be viewed as a Relation Database which contains a sheet and its corresponding information in terms of rows, while in RDBMS each table or say relation also represents its contained information in terms of rows. Each row represents a record which belongs to one or more relation. Spreadsheets uses different formulae to extract required information but it need expert knowledge about the tool and its usage. One can extend the usage of Spreadsheet in any direction as it provides great flexibility in terms of data storage and dependency of stored data. We surveyed some of research which took great attention over Spreadsheets and its applicability in different functional cases, such as Data Visualization, SQL Engines and many more. Our survey focuses on QUERYSHEET, ES-SQL, MDSHEET and PrediCalc [3], [5], [4], [8]. These different researches are motivations to our survey and attraction in Spreadsheets and its functional extensibility

Embedding model-driven spreadsheet queries in spreadsheet systems

Spreadsheets are widely used not only to define mathematical expressions, but also to store large and complex data. To query such data is usually a difficult task to perform, usually for end user. In this work we embed the textual query language in the model-driven spreadsheet environment as a spreadsheet itself. The result is an expressive and powerful query environment that has knowledge of the business logic defined by the spreadsheet data (the spreadsheet model) to guide end users constructing correct queries

Initial report on Object Spreadsheets

There is a growing demand for data-driven web applications that help automate organizational and business processes of low to medium complexity by letting users view and update structured data in controlled ways. We present Object Spreadsheets, an end-user development tool that combines a spreadsheet interface with a rich data model to help the process administrators build the logic for such applications themselves. Its all-in-one interface with immediate feedback has the potential to bring more complex tasks within reach of end-user developers, compared to existing approaches. Our data model is based on the structure of entity-relationship models and directly supports nested variable-size collections and object references, which are common in web applications but poorly accommodated by traditional spreadsheets. Object Spreadsheets has a formula language suited to the data model and supports stored procedures to specify the forms of updates that application users may make. Formulas can be used to assemble data in the exact structure in which it is to be shown in the application UI, simplifying the task of UI building; we intend for Object Spreadsheets to be integrated with a UI builder to provide a complete solution for application development. We describe our prototype implementation and several example applications we built to demonstrate the applicability of the tool