III: Small: Issues in Understanding, Indexing, Querying, and Visualizing Spatio-Textual Spreadsheets on the Web

包括政府机构在内的许多组织都坐在堆积如山的电子表格数据上，这些数据在网络上变得越来越常见，但其内容仍然无法通过搜索引擎访问，因为无法直接链接到其组成单元的内容。因此，电子表格数据代表遗留数据库，特别是因为它们的许多底层模式不再可访问。这项研究的目标是发现构建电子表格所依据的图式。重点放在空间文本电子表格上，这是一个电子表格，其中空间属性的值是以文本形式指定的。这样的电子表格支持空间搜索，其输出是可视的，其效用因能够处理空间同义词而得到增强。这在一定程度上是通过设计方法来自动发现电子表格的空间属性以及如何区分由于存在包含层次结构而产生的它们的几个实例来实现的。特别是，使用了空间一致性，其表现为观察到同一列中的空间数据通常属于相同的空间类型，而同一电子表格行中的空间数据通常表现出包容关系。此外，相邻或邻近的行通常是相似的，这有助于电子表格的一致性。这项研究的广泛影响是使电子表格数据成为网络上的一等公民，与其他文档中的数据一样被发现和访问。描述这项研究和相关研究结果的报告将在athttp://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/spreadsheets.html上提供

Numerous organizations including government agencies are sitting on mountains of spreadsheet data that are becoming increasingly common on the web, but whose contents remain out of reach via search engines because direct links to the contents of their constituent cells arerare. Thus spreadsheet data represent legacy databases, especiallysince many of their underlying schemas are no longer accessible. Thegoal of this research is to discover the schema according to which the spreadsheet is constructed. The focus is on the spatio-textualspreadsheet which is a spreadsheet where the values of the spatialattributes are specified textually. Such spreadsheets support spatialsearches whose output is visual and whose utility is enhanced by beingable to handle spatial synonyms. This is done, in part, by devisingmethods to automatically discover the spatial attributes of thespreadsheet as well as how to distinguish between several instances ofthem which arise due to the presence of a containment hierarchy. Inparticular, use is made of spatial coherence which is manifested byobserving that spatial data in the same column are usually of the samespatial type, while spatial data in the same spreadsheet row usuallyexhibit a containment relationship. Moreover, adjacent or nearby rowsexhibit spreadsheet coherence in that they are usually similar. Thebroad impact of this research is to make spreadsheet data a firstclass citizen on the web with the same chances of being discovered andaccessed as data found in other documents. Reports describingresults of this and related research will be available athttp://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/spreadsheets.html