Publikation
XLSearch: A Search Engine for Spreadsheets
Michael Kohlhase; Corneliu Prodescu; Christian Liguda
In: Simon Thorne; Grenville Croll (Hrsg.). Prodeedings of the EuSpRIG 2013 Conference "Spreadsheet Risk Management". European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group (EuSpRIG-2013), Spreadsheet Risk Management, July 4-5, London, United Kingdom, Pages 47-58, ISBN 978-1-9054045-1-3, Five Star Printing Ldt, Claydon, 2013.
Zusammenfassung
Spreadsheets are end-user programs and domain models that are heavily employed in
administration, financial forecasting, education, and science because of their
intuitive, flexible, and direct approach to computation. As a result, institutions are
swamped by millions of spreadsheets that are becoming increasingly difficult to manage,
access, and control.
This note presents the XLSSearch system, a novel search engine for spreadsheets. It
indexes spreadsheet formulae and efficiently answers formula queries via unification (a
complex query language that allows metavariables in both the query as well as the
index). But a web-based search engine is only one application of the underlying
technology: Spreadsheet formula export to web standards like MathML combined with
formula indexing can be used to find similar spreadsheets or common formula errors.