Paper Info
Title
Using topes to validate and reformat data in end-user programming tools
Abstract
End-user programming tools offer no data types except "string" for many categories of data, such as person names and street addresses. Consequently, these tools cannot automatically validate or reformat these data. To address this problem, we have developed a user-extensible model for string-like data. Each "tope" in this model is a user-defined abstraction that guides the interpretation of strings as a particular kind of data. Specifically, each tope implementation contains software functions for recognizing and reformatting instances of that tope's kind of data. This makes it possible at runtime to distinguish between invalid data, valid data, and questionable data that could be valid or invalid. Once identified, questionable and/or invalid data can be double-checked and possibly corrected, thereby increasing the overall reliability of the data. Valid data can be automatically reformatted to any of the formats appropriate for that kind of data. To show the general applicability of topes, we describe new features that topes have enabled us to provide in four tools.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1145/1370847.1370850
Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on End-user software engineering
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
string-like data,web macros,validation,end-user software engineering,spreadsheets,data,web applications,reformat data,user-extensible model,end-user programming,tope implementation,data type,general applicability,abstraction,valid data,end-user programming tool,questionable data,particular kind,invalid data,data validation,reliability,languages
Conference
7
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.51
14
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
christopher scaffidi169042.94
Allen Cypher2822161.88
Sebastian Elbaum33817203.25
Andhy Koesnandar4302.29
James Lin528216.24
Brad A. Myers68509964.81
Mary Shaw73731587.22