Uncharted Lecture Series: Spreadsheet Composition for Collaborative Data Analysis

Michele SteccaMichele Stecca

ICSI and University of Genoa

Thursday, January 15, 2015
4:00 p.m., Lecture Hall

The Internet is a powerful global network infrastructure which provides basic communication services to enable the development of a variety of interaction paradigms. Examples of interaction paradigms are the Web, according to which the users extract contents from Web sites through browsers, Peer to Peer, according to which the users simultaneously play the roles of information users and providers, and the Service Composition paradigm, according to which a set of software applications combine atomic functionalities typically made available in the form of Web Services.

After briefly introducing the research activities that are carried out at CIPI (Research Center on Computer Platform Engineering, Universities of Padova and Genova) about Service Composition and the Internet of Things, I will introduce a novel interaction paradigm based on Spreadsheet Composition, i.e., in a few words, a paradigm in which the users interact over a Spreadsheet Space, i.e., a virtual space for spreadsheets. In the same way as the World Wide Web initially extended the hypertext concept over the Internet, the SpreadSheet Space extends the natural linked structure of spreadsheets over the Internet.

Spreadsheet Composition can be used to link spreadsheets under a peer to peer relationship, to distribute information, to collect information, to combine information, to access information exposed by corporate software platforms and ERPs as well as to browse Open Data and Big Data reports. In addition it enables spreadsheet based ecosystems in which spreadsheet users receive/process/combine/provide information.

The presentation starts from the basic Service Composition concept and rapidly moves to Spreadsheet Composition. It introduces the basic interaction primitives and the functionalities and presents the architecture of a software platform that supports such interaction primitives and functionalities. It then discusses the distinctive elements of the Spreadsheet Composition paradigm, among which spreadsheet sharing vs. spreadsheet linking, fine vs. coarse grain access to spreadsheet content, information system integration at the desktop, direct vs decoupled database access, local vs. remote data storage, spreadsheet ecosystems, static vs. dynamic open data.

Bio:

Michele Stecca is a Visiting Scholar at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), Berkeley, California, on leave of absence from the University of Genova. He received his Master degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Padova (Italy) in 2007 and a Research Doctorate degree from the University of Genova (Italy) in 2011. He is currently a Post-Doc at CIPI (Interuniversity Computer Platform Research Center, Universities of Genova and Padova). His research interests include JAVA technologies for Service Delivery Platforms (JSLEE, J2EE, JMS), Services Composition, Internet of Things, Spreadsheet Composition, Open Data, and Cloud Computing.

For more info: http://sites.google.com/site/steccami