Spreadsheet programming for collecting, exploring and publishing web data

The Internet has all kinds of data available. Many companies provide Web services that let people access their data programmatically. These data are used every day by thousands of businesses and individuals to create custom applications or to gain insights about specific topics1. The increasing use of Web services has led to the increasing amount of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data, the predominant data format used by current Web services. JSON data is hierarchical and can contain multiple levels of structure. Currently, a person needs to write code to extract and compute data from JSON documents. To retrieve data from Web services and to create custom applications that use the collected data require additional programming efforts.