BACKGROUND There are many challenges associated with ontology building, as the process often touches on many different subject areas; it needs knowledge of the problem domain, an understanding of the ontology formalism, software in use and, sometimes, an understanding of the philosophical background. In practice, it is very rare that an ontology can be completed by a single person, as they are ...

BACKGROUND Spreadsheet software is increasingly used to implement systems science models informing health policy decisions, both in academia and in practice where technical capacity may be limited. However, spreadsheet models are prone to unintentional errors that may not always be identified using standard error-checking techniques. Our objective was to illustrate, through a methodologic case ...

Based on the Spreadsheet Competency Framework for finance professionals, in the present paper we introduce the Edu-Edition of the Spreadsheet Competency Framework (E 2 SCF). We claim that building spreadsheet competences should start in education, as early as possible, and this process is a lot more effective if support arrives from expert teachers. The main feature of E 2 SCF is high mathabili...

Spreadsheets are used heavily in industry and academia. Often, spreadsheet models are developed for years and their complexity grows vastly beyond what the paradigm was originally conceived for. Such complexity often comes at the cost of recalculation performance. However, spreadsheet models usually have some high-level structure that can be used to improve performance by performing independent...

EEective management of battleeeld networks requires a hierarchical network management architecture wherein managers can dyanmically delegate management tasks to intermediate managers. In this report we describe a novel paradigm called the spreadsheet paradigm which extends the traditional at SNMP management model to a hierarchical architecture. We present a spreadsheet MIB, language, and event ...

This study validates a spreadsheet for conditional trend analysis (CTA). CTA was introduced by Goodhardt and Ehrenberg (1967) as an extension to the negative binomial distribution. It predicts the purchase rate of consumers in a subsequent period, based on their current period purchase class (zero buyers, bought once, twice and so forth). These predictions allow companies who use panel data to ...

In contrast to the common view of spreadsheets as “single-user” programs, we have found that spreadsheets offer surprisingly strong support for cooperative development of a wide variety of applications. Ethnographic interviews with spreadsheet users showed that nearly all of the spreadsheets used in the work environments studied were the result of collaborative work by people with different lev...

Automatizing fault localization in programs has been an interesting and active research field for several decades. In order to increase efficiency at least tool support for debugging would be highly required. This holds even more for end-user programs like spreadsheets. In this paper, we discuss three different models for spreadsheet debugging where one relies on qualitative algebra and deviati...

Spreadsheets are ubiquitous in business with the financial sector particularly heavily reliant on the technology. It is known that the level of spreadsheet error can be high and that it is often necessary to review spreadsheets based on a structured methodology which includes a cell by cell examination of the spreadsheet. This paper outlines the early research that has been carried out into the...

The hard coding of input data or constants into spreadsheet formulas is widely recognised as poor spreadsheet model design. However, the importance of avoiding such practice appears to be underestimated perhaps in light of the lack of quantitative error at the time of occurrence and the recognition that this design defect may never result in a bottom-line error. The paper examines both the acad...