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 establishing a 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.