iFUSE: Integrated FUselet Synthesis Environment

A crucial component of the Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) is a collection of fuselets, which are simple programs or scripts that effect small transformations on data. The global effect of a collection of cooperating fuselets is to transform data intoknowledge. We will create an environment for building fuselets and managing the collection of fuselets. Our fuselet development environment, called iFUSE, will automatically classify fuselets and support semantic fuselet discovery and retrieval. Inaddition, it will address a challenge to JBI fuselet designers that has received little attention to date-namely, how to understand the global effect of a multitude of fuselets and ensure that they are cooperating efficiently. Features provided by iFUSEwill include semantic fuselet retrieval, fuselet slicing, fuselet factorization, and change propagation control. The proposed fuselet development environment will provide the support that fuselet developers need in order to create and discover fuselets,avoid design and efficiency pitfalls, and ensure the appropriate factorization of fuselet code. iFUSE will help the designer of an individual fuselet understand the environment in which the fuselet operates, and thus address issues of efficiency and theglobal structure of the fuselet community. Without such a tool, the Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) would eventually suffer from serious performance problems that would be hard to detect and correct.While the initial motivation for this effort is the success of the JBI, this technology has the potential to benefit commercial areas as well. Three possible areas are cooperating agent programs, enterprise integration brokers, and data mining. In thefirst, independent developers need to find agents for potential collaboration, and to understand and control the combined effects of cooperating agents. In the latter two, a JBI-like environment is emerging, in which the same sort of problems will arise.Development of this technology now will enable us to take advantage of future commercial potential in each of these areas.