Raw

Lee Feigenbaum and Ben Szekely have been integrating spreadsheets with the web through RDF, ( WWW2007 slides, PDF) - under the hood it's done programmatically. PS. See Lee's comment . Spreadsheets have also cropped up in the context of GRDDL (check Dan Connolly's slide), for example with Mark Nottingham demonstrating how Excel can be used as an RDF editor.

I'm curious to know if anyone has looked at trying to get useful RDF out of totally generic, real-world spreadsheets using XSLT on the XML output from Excel/OpenOffice - is this even sane? Consider what Dan Bricklin said a while ago:

I believe that one of the most important strengths of a spreadsheet program (the type in the VisiCalc vein, like 1-2-3 and Excel) is that it forces very little structuring on the data as known by the application. It is not a "table editor" with known row and column titles that have meaning. It explicitly allows for and encourages "random" layout and non-homogeneous calculations. The organization and meaning of the data is often specific to the particular application and is an expression of the author. That organization may or may not be discernable by a random reader. Only specific subsets of a spreadsheet (often listed as "Database" sections) are optionally created in a strict format with meaning given to the program.

Given mnot's observation that " Excel spreadsheets contain the bulk of the data in the enterprise", this is probably worth further study...

Once again I find myself wanting to do a conference wrap-up post but more than ever before it seems impossible to say anything without being overwhelmed and missing out stuff...ditto for new job stuff... not a reason to stop blogging though ;-)