Using Structural Computing to Support Information Integration

Software engineers face a difficult task in managing the many different types of relationships that exist between the documents of a software development project. We refer to this task as information integration, since establishinga relationship between two documents typically means that some part of the information in each document is semantically related. A key challenge in information integration is providing techniques and tools that manage and evolve these relationships over time. The structural computing domain provides a set of principles to derive new techniques and tools to help with these tasks of relationship management and evolution. We present a prototype information integration environment, InfiniTe, and describe how we are exploiting structural computing principles in the design of its infrastructure services.