Many end user programming tools such as spreadsheets and databases offer poor support for representing data at a level of abstraction that is intuitive to users. For example, users must work with "strings" rather than person names, phone numbers, or street addresses. As a result, validating and manipulating data is difficult.
Topes is a new user-extensible model for semi-structured data items. Each tope defines how to recognize a kind of data item based on format and context, and how to transform that kind of item among valid formats. To show the usefulness of this model, we will provide an environment to help end-user programmers to create, share, and apply topes, enabling these users to quickly implement data validation and reformatting functionality.
Chris Scaffidi, Brad Myers, and Mary Shaw. Topes: Reusable Abstractions for Validating Data, International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2008), Leipzig, Germany, May 2008, to appear.
Chris Scaffidi, Brad Myers, and Mary Shaw. Toped: Enabling End-User Programmers to Validate Data. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Work-in-Progress Posters (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008, to appear.
Chris Scaffidi, Brad Myers, and Mary Shaw. Tool Support for Data Validation by End-User Programmers. International Conference on Software Engineering - Formal Research Demonstrations (ICSE 2008), Leipzig, Germany, May 2008, to appear.
Chris Scaffidi, Allen Cypher, Sebastian Elbaum, Andhy Koesnandar, James Lin, Brad Myers, and Mary Shaw. Using Topes to Validate and Reformat Data in End-User Programming Tools. Fourth Workshop on End-User Software Engineering (WEUSE IV), at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2008), Leipzig, Germany, May 2008, to appear.
Chris Scaffidi. Unsupervised Inference of Data Formats in Human-Readable Notation. Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - HCI Volume (ICEIS 2007), Madeira, Portugal, June 2007, pp. 236-241.
Chris Scaffidi and Mary Shaw. Accommodating Data Heterogeneity in ULS Systems. Second International Workshop on Ultra-Large-Scale Software-Intensive Systems (ULSSIS 2008), at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2008), Leipzig, Germany, May 2008, to appear.
C. Scaffidi. Unsupervised Inference of Data Formats in Human-Readable Notation. Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Enterprise Integration Systems (ICEIS'07), 2007, to appear.
C. Scaffidi. A Data Model to Support End User Software Engineering. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'07) doctoral symposium, to appear.
C. Scaffidi. A Lightweight Model for End Users' Domain-Specific Data. Graduate Consortium abstract in VL/HCC'06: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, pp. 242-243, 2006.