Abstract
Spreadsheets are widely adopted as “popular databases”, where authors shape their solutions interactively. Although spreadsheets are easily adaptable by the author, their informal schemas cannot be automatically interpreted by machines to integrate data across independent spreadsheets. In biology, we observed a significant amount of biodiversity data in spreadsheets treated as isolated entities with different tabular organizations, but with high potential for data articulation. In order to automatically interpret these spreadsheets we exploit construction patterns followed by users in the biodiversity domain. This paper details evidences of such patterns and how they can lead to characterize the nature of a spreadsheet, as well as, its fields in a domain. It combines an automatic analysis of thousands of spreadsheets, collected on the Web, with results from a survey conducted with biologists. We propose a representation model to be used in automatic interpretation systems that captures these patterns.
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Acknowledgements
Work partially financed by FAPESP (2012/16159-6), the Microsoft Research FAPESP Virtual Institute (NavScales project), the Center for Computational Engineering and Sciences - Fapesp/Cepid 2013/08293-7, CNPq (grant 143483/2011-0, MuZOO Project and PRONEX-FAPESP), INCT in Web Science (CNPq 557.128/2009-9), CAPES, as well as individual grants from CNPq.
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Bernardo, I.R., Borges, M., Baranauskas, M.C.C., Santanchè, A. (2015). Interpretation of Construction Patterns for Biodiversity Spreadsheets. In: Cordeiro, J., Hammoudi, S., Maciaszek, L., Camp, O., Filipe, J. (eds) Enterprise Information Systems. ICEIS 2014. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 227. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22348-3_22
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