Title
User-Driven automation of web form filling
Abstract
Form-intensive Web applications are common among institutions that collect bulks of data in a piecemeal fashion. European funding programs or income tax return illustrate these scenarios. Very often, most of this data is already digitalized in terms of documents, spreadsheets or databases. The task of manually filling Web forms out of these resources is not only cumbersome but also prone to typos. It does not benefit from the fact that the data is already in electronic format. Alternatively, externally-fed autofilling scripts can be programmed (e.g. using iMacros and Visual Basic) to code once, and enact many times. Unfortunately, this approach is programming intensive and fragile upon upgrades in either the website or the structure of the external source. This moves these tools away from users with scarce programming skills. We strive to empower these users by abstracting the way feeding solutions are realised. Since external sources tend to be structured, they offer the chance to be abstracted in terms of models. Autofilling scripts can then be generated as weavings between the external data model and the website model. We describe WebFeeder, a plugin for iMacros that introduces autofilling-scriptmodels as first-class artifacts in iMacros. The synthesis, enactment and maintenance of these script models are handled without leaving iMacros, minimizing users' cognitive load and involvement.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1007/978-3-642-39200-9_16
ICWE
Keywords
Field
DocType
european funding program,script model,autofilling script,cognitive load,visual basic,web form,external source,form-intensive web application,website model,scarce programming skill,external data model,user-driven automation
Data mining,Income tax,World Wide Web,Visual Basic,Software engineering,Computer science,Automation,Plug-in,Web application,Cognitive load,Data model,Scripting language
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
7
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Oscar Díaz141562.28
Itziar Otaduy220.74
Gorka Puente3294.48