Tool Support for Data Validation by End-User Programmers

<p>End-user programming tools for creating spreadsheets and webforms</p> <p>offer no data types except “string” for storing many kinds of</p> <p>data, such as person names and street addresses. Consequently,</p> <p>these tools cannot automatically validate these data.</p> <p>To address this problem, we have developed a new userextensible</p> <p>model for string-like data. Each “tope” in this model is</p> <p>a user-defined abstraction that guides the interpretation of strings</p> <p>as a particular kind of data, such as a mailing address. Specifically,</p> <p>each tope implementation contains software functions for</p> <p>recognizing and reformatting that tope’s kind of data.</p> <p>With our tools, end-user programmers define new topes and associate</p> <p>them with fields in spreadsheets, webforms, and other programs.</p> <p>This makes it possible at runtime to distinguish between</p> <p>invalid data, valid data, and questionable data that could be valid</p> <p>or invalid. Once identified, questionable and/or invalid data can</p> <p>be double-checked and possibly corrected, thereby increasing the</p> <p>overall reliability of the data.</p>