A researcher at University of Maryland at Baltimore County has developed an application that enables spreasheets to come alive.
RDF123, developed by UMBC PhD student Lushan Han, maps spreadsheet data to Resource Description Framework (RDF), which according to the W3C, integrates a variety of apps using XML as an interchange syntax.
According to this report:
RDF123 is an application that allows users to create and edit graphical maps that specify how a row in a given spreadsheet should be converted into an RDF graph. When applied to a particular spreadsheet, the graphs produced for each row of data are combined to produce a single graph for the entire spreadsheet. This approach avoids the restriction imposed by earlier converters that each spreadsheet row corresponds to a single RDF instance and allows for the construction of moderately complex graphs. RDF123 maps support simple expression language allows the cell values to be tested concatenated or have a function applied to produce literal values or references to other RDF nodes.
