No Application Is an Island: Using Topes to Transform Strings during Data Transfer

Abstract

Users and programmers frequently need to move information between applications, including desktop and web applications. Transferring data often involves reformatting strings such as phone numbers or extracting parts from them, but actually performing these transformations typically requires tedious, error-prone operations. For example, programmers must write messy code to parse and reformat strings passed between web services, while ordinary end users must manually reformat strings that they want to copy-paste between applications. In this paper, we show at an architectural level how topes can be used to smooth the flow of data between applications by automatically transforming strings on demand. We have demonstrated the generality and usefulness of this approach by using topes to automatically transform data moving between applications, web sites and web services, thereby showing how topes can make it simpler for both end users and programmers to transfer information between applications.

Web Service Composition

“…For example, BioFlow [Jamil et al 2010], a declarative language for scientific workflows, extends SQL with specific statements for the transformation/integration of XML data. Asavametha et al [2011] propose the use of Topes [Scaffidi et al 2008], a transformation language for strings able to reformat strings passed between services. Active XML [Abiteboul et al 2004] is a framework for the integration of data by means of service calls embedded in XML documents.…”

DataSheets: A Spreadsheet-Based Data-Flow Language

“…Data is getting ever vaster more rapidly, yet data in turn may be combined to generate usable information. At the same time, 8% of all U.S. jobs require programming skills often needed to analyze data and generate reports relying just on simple personal productivity software [2], involving many data transferring tasks (e.g., parse and reformat strings passed between Web services) [3]. However since data is often distributed over a multitude of systems in many different formats, these tasks often remain complex requiring the ability of expert programmers.…”