The Semantic Spreadsheet

Spreadsheets are one of the most widely used data management tools. Although intuitive and easy to use, they suffer from a number of issues. Numerous publications indicate that most spreadsheets contain errors and that spreadsheet-based data shadow systems lead to problems such as the “spreadmart dilemma” creating inconsistent views on organizational data. In this paper, we describe “ The Semantic Spreadsheet ”, a new data model for a semantically accurate spreadsheet system. Unlike the existing data models, the described model is a presentation independent data model based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) that avoids the spreadmart dilemma by providing a semantically sound data structure. We describe the set-theoretic and relational algebraic operations on the data model and show how it can improve data integrity.