Software engineers confront many challenges during software development. One challenge is managing the relationships that exist between software artifacts. We refer to this task as information integration, since establishing a relationship between documents typically implies that an engineer must integrate information from each of the documents to perform a development task. In the past, we have applied open hypermedia techniques and technology to address this challenge. We now extend this work with the development of an information integration environment. We present the design of our environment along with details of its first prototype implementation. Furthermore, we describe our efforts to evaluate the utility of our approach. Our first experiment involves the discovery of keyword relationships between text-based software artifacts. Our second experiment examines the code of an open source project and generates a report on how its module relationships have evolved over time. Finally, our third experiment develops the capability to link code claiming to implement W3C standards with the XHTML representation of the standards themselves. These experiments combine to demonstrate the promise of our approach. We conclude by asserting that the process of software development can be significantly enhanced if more tools made their relationships available for integration.

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Structural computing provides techniques and tools to ease the task of developing application infrastructure; infrastructure that provides common services such as persistence, naming, distribution, navigational hypermedia, etc., over a set of application-specific or domain-specific structures. Within structural computing, "structure" refers to a combination of data together with relationships pertaining to that data. Structure servers support the specification and manipulation of structures. One important aspect of structural computing is the power and flexibility it provides application developers constructing new applications. A large part of this power is due to structural computing's ability to provide awareness services for both structure and behavior. We define this concept and describe the awareness services provided by the Themis structural computing environment. The utility of these services are demonstrated by presenting the impact they have had on the InfiniTe information integration environment. In particular, these services help to increase the efficiency and reduce the size of domain-specific applications built using structural computing technology. We conclude by discussing how these services might influence the open hypermedia field and the development of new hypermedia services.

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