Spreadsheets with a Semantic Layer

Spreadsheets are active documents that are heavily employed in administration, financial forecasting, education, and science because of their intuitive, flexible, 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

Towards MKM in the Large: Modular Representation and Scalable Software Architecture

MKM has been defined as the quest for technologies to manage mathematical knowledge. MKM "in the small" is well-studied, so the real problem is to scale up to large, highly interconnected corpora: "MKM in the large". We contend that advances in two areas are needed to reach this goal. We need representation languages that support incremental processing of all primitive MKM operations, and we need software architectures and implementations that implement these operations scalably on large knowledge bases. We present instances of both in this paper: the MMT framework for modular theory-graphs that integrates meta-logical foundations, which forms the base of the next OMDoc version; and TNTBase, a versioned storage system for XML-based document formats. TNTBase becomes an MMT database by instantiating it with special MKM operations for MMT.Comment: To appear in The 9th International Conference on Mathematical Knowledge Management: MKM 201