The " InfoHarness" Information Integration Platform

The “InfoHarness” information integration platform, tools, and services being developed at Bellcore are aimed atproviding integrated and rapid access to huge amounts of heterogeneous information independent of the type, rep-resentation, and location of information. InfoHarness provides advanced search and browsing capabilities withoutimposing the burden of restructuring, reformatting or relocating information on information suppliers or creators.This is achieved through object-oriented encapsulation of information and the associated meta-information (e.g.,type, location, access rights, owner, creation date, etc.). The meta-information extraction methods ensure rapidand largely automatic creation of information repositories. A gateway that supports access to InfoHarness reposi-tories from Mosaic and other HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) compliant browsers is currently available. AnHTTP compliant InfoHarness server is under construction.