A Deductive Spreadsheet System for End Users

We exploit the spreadsheet metaphor to make deductive problem-solving methods available to the vast population of spreadsheet end users. In particular, we show how the function-based problem-solving capabilities of spreadsheets can be extended to include logical deductive methods in a way that is consistent with the existing spreadsheet "look and feel." We also show a spreadsheet-based framework for authoring logic implication rules. This framework was conceived with the objective of reproducing many of the characteristics that make spreadsheet programming accessible to end users. In the proposed framework, rule authors describe the semantics of a binary relation by constructing a functional spreadsheet model that computes the image of that binary relation. This model is subsequently translated into a collection of logic implication rules. We implemented this deductive spreadsheet system on top of Microsoft Excel and adopting the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard ontology language OWL+SWRL formalisms.