SBIR-STTR Award

As requested in the solicitation, we will be adding a spreadsheet graphic user interface (GUI) to a deductive logic system, but we will not create this GUI. Instead, we will use the GUI from the most successful Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) spreadsheet - Excel. Thus, we will be integrating the deductive logic system into this successful COTS spreadsheet rather than developing a new spreadsheet system. Data will be mapped back and forth between the spreadsheet and the knowledgebase of the deductive logic system, so that spreadsheet data can be used as facts (triples) in the deductive logic system and the information it derives can be placed back in the spreadsheet as computed results. Utilizing the spreadsheet metaphor this mapping will equate an individual spreadsheet cell as the value of an attribute (column heading) of an object (entity whose values are displayed within a row). The spreadsheet will be extended to allow references to those objects (such as father) to be placed in a cell, to handle multi-valued attributes (such as sister), and to define the mappings that couple the spreadsheet to the deductive logic system

We will integrate a deductive logic system with the GUI from the most successful Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) spreadsheet – Excel. We will then deploy this extension as an Excel Add-In. The deductive logic system will be OWL, W3C’s ontology language for the semantic web, extended with OWL’s rule language. This will extend the variety of data that can be displayed in spreadsheet cells to encompass the symbolic (non-numeric, non-textual) classes definable in ontologies. The Excel formula language will be transparently extended to support deduction rules. This will enable logic-derived values to act as input to native Excel formulas and vice versa. We can accomplish this integration because Excel already provides the critical extensibility hooks through its plugin architecture, providing for GUI extensions (new tools, menus), providing callbacks to intervene in crucial user events, such as filling in a cell with a user-entered or derived value, and provide the plugin code with extensive access to an object-oriented model of the spreadsheet itself.

Keywords:
deductive logic, Ontology, COTS spreadsheet, OWL, SWIRL, COTS extension