Patent ID: 7415481
Filing Date: 2008-08-19
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
1. A method, executed in a computer system, for referring to a set of data within a spreadsheet application, comprising: receiving one or more semantic designations, wherein the one or more semantic designations describe one or more items of data in a data structure; automatically creating a structural reference to the data structure, wherein the structural reference is an unbounded number of cells; associating the one or more semantic designations with the structural reference, wherein associating the one or more semantic designations with the structural reference comprises at least one of the following: determining when context information in the spreadsheet is proximate the data; when context information is proximate the data, providing a context for evaluating which cells contain the data and which cells contain a data label and updating the structural reference wherein the label and data remained linked; when the data is stored in a database, determining ambiguity within the data, wherein the ambiguity arises because the one or more semantic designations contain duplicate captions; when ambiguity within the data is due to the one or more semantic designations containing duplicate captions, disambiguating the one or more semantic designations by use of a modifier, thereby creating a modified semantic designation; storing the association between the one or more semantic designations or the modified semantic designation and the structural reference.