A Functional Spreadsheet Framework for Authoring Logic Implication Rules

This paper introduces a functional spreadsheet 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 and integrated this framework into a deductive spreadsheet system that extends Microsoft Excel with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard ontology language OWL + SWRL.