RightField: Scientific knowledge acquisition by stealth through ontology-enabled spreadsheets

Abstract

RightField is a Java application that provides a mechanism for embedding ontology annotation support for scientific data in Microsoft Excel or Open Office spreadsheets. The result is semantic annotation by stealth, with an annotation process that is less error-prone, more efficient, and more consistent with community standards. By automatically generating RDF statements for each cell a rich, Linked Data querying environment allows scientists to search their data and other Linked Data resources interchangeably, and caters for queries across heterogeneous spreadsheets. RightField has been developed for Systems Biologists but has since adopted more widely. It is open source (BSD license) and freely available from http://www.rightfield.org.uk. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.