Authors
Andrea Kohlhase, Michael Kohlhase, & Ana Guseva
Abstract
Even though spreadsheet programs traditionally concentrate on exploration and computation of data (the author's view), a non-trivial proportion of spreadsheets are used for communicating data, models, and decisions to humans who assume the role of a spreadsheet reader.
The communicative use of spreadsheets gives the spreadsheet context, that is, the background knowledge needed to interpret and make sense of its content, a very important role. Indeed, many 'spreadsheet errors' can be traced to mis-interpretations due to context failures.
In this paper we report on a set of experiments we conducted to get a deeper understanding of the context in spreadsheet comprehension, focusing on the different perspectives authors and readers take in understanding spreadsheets.
The results confirm missing context information as a likely source for semantic spreadsheet errors. Moreover, they lead to an extension and refinement of already established context dimensions.
Sample
Glyphs, data, information, and knowledge can be seen as stages of a pipeline. Spreadsheet values are data that can be computed by the spreadsheet software. For obtaining meaning from such data we still need another component: the context of meaning.
Publication
2015, Software Engineering Methods in Spreadsheets, May
