Publication
Modeling the Structure of Spreadsheets
Christian Liguda
In: Kerstin Bach; Michael Meder (Hrsg.). Workshop on Knowledge and Experience Management. German Workshop on Knowledge and Experience Management (WM-2012), located at LWA-2012, September 12-14, Dortmund, Germany, Pages 13-17, Online: http://dfki.de/~bach/FGWM-2012-Proc.pdf, 2012.
Abstract
Spreadsheets are widely used in many different
domains like business planning or science, e.g.
for calculation, planning, statistical analysis or
test evaluation. For these and many other domains
it is important that spreadsheets are error
free, easy to interpret, maintain and change.
However, in the last years it has become more
and more evident that spreadsheets are highly erroneous
and hard to maintain. The main reason
for this is the lack of high level structures
in spreadsheets, which rather allow a more structured
than a cell based view. In this paper
we present an abstract model for spreadsheets,
which is able to represent the underlying structure
explicit and is independent of the concrete
layout. This model is part of a project in which
the abstract model is used to assist a user in creating
and understanding large and complex spreadsheets.