III: Small: Making and Tracing: Architecture-centric Information Integration

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In many scientific domains information is scattered across numerous interrelated and heterogeneous artifacts. In software engineering in particular, artifacts such as requirements, design documents, and code are often isolated by tools, development groups, and geographic locations. Current traceability approaches ? attempts to link related information ? fall short in tracing across heterogeneous artifacts and in supporting user-customized links. This project is aimed at crossing these information barriers, enabling the creation of traceability links between related artifacts, to support tasks such as impact analysis and software maintenance.This project targets automated architecture-centric traceability which centers links on the architecture, enabling scalable and flexible link capture. Furthermore, stakeholders control link capture, enabling them to directly benefit from the links. The prevalent approach to automatic traceability is to recover links from existing artifacts. In contrast, this project pursues prospective generation of trace links which captures links in situ, while artifacts are generated or modified, enabling the capture of contextual relationships. Open hypermedia adapters enable the capture of links across heterogeneous artifacts and the rendering of resources at different levels of granularity. Users can determine the artifacts to trace and the link semantics to assign via externally customizable rules.The approach is applicable to data provenance capture in e-Science. Prospective capture can aid in inferring experiment design and capturing links across heterogeneous artifacts like publications, data files, and plots. The results will also be valuable to the development of safety critical systems where satisfaction of all requirements is part of safety assurance.