Gneiss: spreadsheet programming using structured web service data. (April 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Chang, Kerry Shih-Ping; Myers, Brad A.
• Is Part Of: Journal of visual languages & computing. Volume 39(2017)
• Page Start: 41
• Page End: 50
• Publication Date: 2017-04
• Subjects: Spreadsheet -- Mashup -- End-user programming; Visual programming languages (Computer science) -- Periodicals; Visual programming (Computer science) -- Periodicals; Programming languages (Electronic computers) -- Semantics -- Periodicals; Langages de programmation visuelle -- Périodiques; Programmation visuelle -- Périodiques; Langages de programmation -- Sémantique -- Périodiques; Programming languages (Electronic computers) -- Semantics; Visual programming (Computer science); Visual programming languages (Computer science); Periodicals; Electronic journals; 005
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jvlc.2016.07.004
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1045-926X

Abstract

Abstract: Web services offer a more reliable and efficient way to access online data than scraping web pages. However, interacting with web services to retrieve data often requires people to write a lot of code. Moreover, many web services return data in complex hierarchical structures that make it difficult for people to perform any further data manipulation. We developed Gneiss, a tool that extends the familiar spreadsheet metaphor to support using structured web service data. Gneiss lets users retrieve or stream arbitrary JSON data returned from web services to a spreadsheet using interaction techniques without writing any code. It introduces a novel visualization that represents hierarchies in data using nested spreadsheet cells and allows users to easily reshape and regroup the extracted structured data. Data flow is two-way between the spreadsheet and the web services, enabling people to easily make a new web service call and retrieve new data by modifying spreadsheet cells. We report results form a user study that showed that Gneiss helped spreadsheet users use and analyze structured data more efficiently than Excel and even outperform professional programmers writing code. We further use a set of examples to demonstrate our tool's ability to create reusable data extraction and manipulation programs that work with complex web service data. Highlights: A spreadsheet tool for using structured web service data. Constructing two-way data flow between web services and spreadsheets without writing code. A new design to view and use hierarchical data in spreadsheets. An architecture that interacts with web services dynamically using spreadsheet data.