Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T19:40:06.893Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Implementing logic spreadsheets in LESS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2007

ANDRE VALENTE
Affiliation:
Alelo, Inc., 11965 Venice Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90045, USA; e-mail: [email protected]
DAVID VAN BRACKLE
Affiliation:
Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories, 3 Executive Campus, 6th Floor, Cherry Hill, NJ 08002, USA; e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]
HANS CHALUPSKY
Affiliation:
USC Information Sciences Institute, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292, USA; e-mail:[email protected]
GARY EDWARDS
Affiliation:
Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories, 3 Executive Campus, 6th Floor, Cherry Hill, NJ 08002, USA; e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract

Spreadsheets are a widespread tool for a variety of tasks, particularly in business settings. Spreadsheet users employ a form of programming that, although popular, is highly error-prone and has limited expressiveness. A promising approach to overcome these shortcomings is to augment spreadsheets with logic-based knowledge representation and reasoning (KR&R) functionality. In this paper, we present Logic Embedded in SpreadSheets (LESS), a system which integrates PowerLoom, a highly expressive logic-based KR&R system, with Microsoft (MS) Excel. The design of LESS provides different tiers of functionality that explore trade-offs between direct access to the underlying logic engine and user-friendly support for spreadsheets users. A prototype of LESS was implemented as an MS Excel add-in.

Type
Research Article
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.)

References

Abraham, R. and Erwig, M. 2004 Header and unit inference for spreadsheets through spatial analyses. In IEEE International Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, pp. 165–172.Google Scholar
Chalupsky, H., MacGregor, R. and Russ, T. 2006 PowerLoom Manual, USC Information Sciences Institute. Available at www.isi.edu/isd/LOOM/PowerLoom.Google Scholar
Erwig, M., Abraham, R., Cooperstein, I. and Kollmansberger, S. 2005 Automatic generation and maintenance of correct spreadsheets. In 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 136–145.Google Scholar
Erwig, M. and Burnett, M. 2002 Adding apples and oranges. Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages, 4th International Symposium, PADL 2002, Vol. 2257 of LNCS, Springer, pp. 173–191.Google Scholar
Genesereth, M. 1991 Knowledge interchange format. In Allen, J., Fikes, R.and Sandewall, E. (eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Morgan Kaufmann, Cambridge, MA, pp. 599–600.Google Scholar
MacGregor, R. 1994 A description classifier for the predicate calculus. In Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 213–220.Google Scholar
Paine, J. 2004 Spreadsheet structure discovery with logic programming. In Proceedings of EuSpRIG 2004, Klagenfurt, Austria.Google Scholar
Spenke, M. and Beilken, C. 1989 A spreadsheet interface for logic programming In Bice, K. and Lewis, C. (eds.), Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Wings For the Mind (CHI ’89), ACM Press, New York, NY, pp. 75–80.Google Scholar
Valente, A., Russ, T., MacGregor, R. and Swartout, W. 1999 Building and (re)using an ontology of air campaign planning. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 14(1):2736.Google Scholar
Valente, A. and Scacchi, W. 1999 Developing a knowledge web for business process redesign, In Proceedings of the IJCAI’99 Workshop on Intelligent Workflow and Process Management: The New Frontier for AI in Business.Google Scholar
Witkowski, A., Bellamkonda, S., Bozkaya, T., Dorman, G., Folkert, N., Gupta, A., Shen, L. and Subramanian, S. (2003). Spreadsheets in rdbms for olap. In SIGMOD ’03: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, ACM Press, pp. 5263.CrossRefGoogle Scholar