DataSheets: A Spreadsheet-Based Data-Flow Language

Abstract

We are surrounded by data, a vast amount of data that has brought about an increasing need for combining and analyzing it in order to extract information and generate knowledge. A need not exclusive of big software companies with expert programmers; from scientists to bloggers, many end-user programmers currently demand data management tools to generate information according to their discretion. However, data is usually distributed among multiple sources, hence, it requires to be integrated, and unfortunately, this process is still available just for professional developers. In this paper we propose DataSheets, a novel approach to make the data-flow specification accessible and its representation comprehensible to end-user programmers. This approach consists of a spreadsheet-based data-flow language that has been tested and evaluated in a service-centric composition framework.