SurveMe: A DSL for the Design of Web-based Surveys

Having long established themselves as the prime instrument of scientific and market research, surveys are increasingly hosted on websites and accessed from web-enabled devices like desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones via web browsers. Today, an increasing number of commercial tools are available to support users in the creation of such web-based surveys. These solutions often implement WYSIWYG interfaces, hiding the underlying code from their mainly non-programming target group under a graphical layer. Unfortunately, this also hides the semantics of the questionnaires, which can make it harder to gain valuable results from analyses of the acquired data. The alternative employment of professional programmers implementing questionnaires from scratch has the disadvantage that domain experts and programmers may find it hard to communicate since there is no common understanding of the domain. This thesis introduces SurveMe, a domain-specific language for the creation of web- based questionnaires, as a new approach to web survey design. Representing an alternative or possible addition to commercial survey tools, the DSL aims to support programming and non- programming users alike. Providing a simple textual interface that utilizes adequate abstractions of the survey design domain, the language strives for simplicity, consistency, homogeneity, and flexibility.