A Spreadsheet-Based User Interface for Managing Plural Relationships in Structured Data
A key feature of relational database applications is managing \emph{plural} relationships---one-to-many and many-to-many---between entities. However, since it is often infeasible to adopt or develop a new database application for any given schema at hand, information workers instead turn to spreadsh...
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
2012
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/72375 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1258-4974 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0024-5847 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0442-691X |
| _version_ | 1826210026188963840 |
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| author | Bakke, Eirik Karger, David R. Miller, Robert C. |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Bakke, Eirik Karger, David R. Miller, Robert C. |
| author_sort | Bakke, Eirik |
| collection | MIT |
| description | A key feature of relational database applications is managing \emph{plural} relationships---one-to-many and many-to-many---between entities. However, since it is often infeasible to adopt or develop a new database application for any given schema at hand, information workers instead turn to spreadsheets, which lend themselves poorly to schemas requiring multiple related entity sets. In this paper, we propose to reduce the cost-usability gap between spreadsheets and tailor-made relational database applications by extending the spreadsheet paradigm to let the user establish relationships between rows in related worksheets as well as view and navigate the hierarchical cell structure that arises as a result. We present Related Worksheets, a spreadsheet-like prototype application, and evaluate it with a screencast-based user study on 36 Mechanical Turk workers. First-time users of our software were able to solve lookup-type query tasks with the same or higher accuracy as subjects using Microsoft Excel, in one case 40% faster on average. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T14:40:06Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/72375 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T14:40:06Z |
| publishDate | 2012 |
| publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/723752022-10-01T21:58:37Z A Spreadsheet-Based User Interface for Managing Plural Relationships in Structured Data Bakke, Eirik Karger, David R. Miller, Robert C. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Karger, David R. Bakke, Eirik Karger, David R. Miller, Robert C. A key feature of relational database applications is managing \emph{plural} relationships---one-to-many and many-to-many---between entities. However, since it is often infeasible to adopt or develop a new database application for any given schema at hand, information workers instead turn to spreadsheets, which lend themselves poorly to schemas requiring multiple related entity sets. In this paper, we propose to reduce the cost-usability gap between spreadsheets and tailor-made relational database applications by extending the spreadsheet paradigm to let the user establish relationships between rows in related worksheets as well as view and navigate the hierarchical cell structure that arises as a result. We present Related Worksheets, a spreadsheet-like prototype application, and evaluate it with a screencast-based user study on 36 Mechanical Turk workers. First-time users of our software were able to solve lookup-type query tasks with the same or higher accuracy as subjects using Microsoft Excel, in one case 40% faster on average. 2012-08-28T17:35:44Z 2012-08-28T17:35:44Z 2011-05 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/ConferencePaper 978-1-4503-0228-9 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/72375 Eirik Bakke, David Karger, and Rob Miller. 2011. A spreadsheet-based user interface for managing plural relationships in structured data. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '11). https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1258-4974 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0024-5847 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0442-691X en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979313 Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11) Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ application/pdf Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) MIT web domain |
| spellingShingle | Bakke, Eirik Karger, David R. Miller, Robert C. A Spreadsheet-Based User Interface for Managing Plural Relationships in Structured Data |
| title | A Spreadsheet-Based User Interface for Managing Plural Relationships in Structured Data |
| title_full | A Spreadsheet-Based User Interface for Managing Plural Relationships in Structured Data |
| title_fullStr | A Spreadsheet-Based User Interface for Managing Plural Relationships in Structured Data |
| title_full_unstemmed | A Spreadsheet-Based User Interface for Managing Plural Relationships in Structured Data |
| title_short | A Spreadsheet-Based User Interface for Managing Plural Relationships in Structured Data |
| title_sort | spreadsheet based user interface for managing plural relationships in structured data |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/72375 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1258-4974 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0024-5847 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0442-691X |
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