Using open hypermedia to support information integration

Abstract

The task of information integration challenges software engineers on a daily basis. Software artifacts, produced during software development, contain many implicit and explicit relationships whose sheer numbers quickly overwhelm a software team’s ability to understand, manipulate, and evolve them. We are developing an information integration environment to aid software engineers in tackling this difficult task and are making use of open hypermedia techniques to enable critical characteristics of the environment, such as third-party tool integration, typed links, and a partitioned information space through the use of contexts, traditionally referred to as composites. We describe our prototype implementation of the information integration environment, focusing on how open hypermedia has either influenced the design of the environment, or contributed directly to its functional capabilities.