SpreadMash: A Spreadsheet-Based Interactive Browsing and Analysis Tool for Data Services Woralak Kongdenfha 1 , Boualem Benatallah 1 , R´ egis Saint-Paul 1 , and Fabio Casati 2 1 CSE, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia {woralakk,boualem,regiss}@cse.unsw.edu.au 2 DIT, University of Trento, Via Sommarive 14, I-38050 POVO (TN), Italy casati@dit.unitn.it Abstract. Spreadsheets are one of the most popular end-users program- ming environment. Although spreadsheets provide an interactive inter- face for data manipulation and analysis, they are mostly used today in data entry mode and not as interactive browsing tool for data stored in underlying data sources. In this paper, we present SpreadMash, a high-level language and tool for interactive data browsing and analysis for data services. The key innovation of SpreadMash is a repository of application building blocks called data widgets that characterize various data importation and presentation patterns in spreadsheets. Data wid- gets enable the separation of end-users tasks (composing data widgets) from the tasks of data architects (creating data abstractions and data widgets). Through a series of examples we illustrate how tasks that would be challenging in existing environments are facilitated by SpreadMash. 1 Introduction Interactive data presentation and analysis applications are applications that al- low users to enter or present information stored in the underlying data sources, and possibly to perform manipulation operations on these data, such as calcula- tions or aggregations. Examples of such applications include relational reporting applications and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) systems. Relational re- porting tools, such as Crystal Reports [2], enable reporting against relational databases. They deliver information, but provide very little support for interac- tive analysis [3,6]. On the other hand, OLAP systems are specialized technologies that present numerical data in a multidimensional format and provide more pow- erful analytical capabilities than relational reporting tools. While OLAP systems deliver advanced analytics, these features exceed the skills and capabilities of the average PC users. One of the most successful paradigms for data analysis is that of spreadsheets [3,6,8,16]. The success of spreadsheets comes from: – an interactive interface that make it easy to view, and interact with the data [14]. Spreadsheets also provide analysis and manipulation alternatives that span various application domains such as financial, statistics, etc.; Z. Bellahs` ene and M. L´ eonard (Eds.): CAiSE 2008, LNCS 5074, pp. 343–358, 2008. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008