TOOL INTEGRATION IN A KNOWLEDGE ABSTRACTION ENVIRONMENT

The productivity of a programmer can be promoted by using multi-vendor 's CASE tools. The more tools are used, the more complicated communica tion is needed. The integration of these tools is thus important. This paper describes an architecture named Tool Integration Platform (TIP) to integrate tools in a knowledge abstraction way. TIP is composed of a Control Integration Daemon (CID), a Control Integration Interface ( CII) and some Integration Inference Rules (IIR) that are applied by th e Integration Inference Engine (IIE). The IIR are stored in a Reposito ry and used to deduce tool knowledge dynamically. In this way, many to ols can be integrated into a cooperative software environment. To veri fy this architecture, a number of tools including an editor, a test an alyzer, the existing compilers and tracers are integrated into TIP. Fi nally, a number of compared components are used to assess the TIP with other environments and standards. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Scie nce Inc. All rights reserved.