Tool Support for Data Validation by End-User Programmers

End-user programming tools for creating spreadsheets and webforms

offer no data types except “string” for storing many kinds of

data, such as person names and street addresses. Consequently,

these tools cannot automatically validate these data.

To address this problem, we have developed a new userextensible

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, such as a mailing address. Specifically,

each tope implementation contains software functions for

recognizing and reformatting that tope’s kind of data.

With our tools, end-user programmers define new topes and associate

them with fields in spreadsheets, webforms, and other programs.

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.