Chisel: Sculpting Tabular and Non-Tabular Data on the Web

Abstract

Chisel is a tool for flexible manipulation of CSV-like data, motivated by the recent effort of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) towards a recommendation for tabular data and metadata on the Web. In brief, Chisel supports an expressive built-in schema language for CSV-like data, that can handle both tabular and non-tabular data. Furthermore, it supports a simple programming language for transforming tabular and non-tabular CSV-like data. In the demo, we showcase the system for specifying and validating schemas, building transformations, and setting up a pipeline for automatic conversion of "wild" CSV-like data into structured tabular data. We present use cases for Chisel specifically targeted at exemplifying the ease of specifying, modifying, and understanding Sculpt schemas as well as extracting and transforming data.