Tool Integration in a Knowledge Abstraction Environment

[[abstract]]The productivity of a programmer can be promoted by using multi-vendor's CASE tools. The more tools are used, the more complicated communication 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 the Integration Inference Engine (IIE). The IIR are stored in a Repository and used to deduce tool knowledge dynamically. In this way, many tools can be integrated into a cooperative software environment. To verify this architecture, a number of tools including an editor, a test analyzer, the existing compilers and tracers are integrated into TIP. Finally, a number of compared components are used to assess the TIP with other environments and standards