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海量的电子表格数据上，这些数据在网络上变得越来越普遍，但其内容仍然无法通过搜索引擎获得，因为很少有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，特别是在它们的许多底层模式不再可访问的情况下。本研究的目标是发现构建电子表格所依据的模式。重点是空间-文本电子表格，这是一种以文本方式指定空间属性值的电子表格。这种电子表格支持空间搜索，其输出是可视化的，并且通过能够处理空间同义词增强了其实用性。这在一定程度上是通过设计自动发现电子表格的空间属性的方法，以及如何区分由于包含层次结构的存在而出现的几个实例来实现的。特别是利用了空间一致性，这表现在观察同一列中的空间数据通常具有相同的空间类型，而同一电子表格行的空间数据通常表现出包含关系。此外，相邻或附近的行显示电子表格的一致性，因为它们通常是相似的。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有被发现和访问的机会。描述本研究和相关研究结果的报告将在https://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