An Approach to Integrating and Creating Flexible Software Environments

Engineers and scientists are attempting to represent, analyze, and reason about increasingly complex systems. Because of the complexity of these systems, no single analysis, model, approach, or viewpoint is sufficient. Such complex systems require not only the availability of a variety of analysis tools, knowledge bases, databases, and programs of all sorts, but also a framework within which these different programs, types of information, and viewpoints can be brought together. Software developers have responded to these needs by introducing the concept of a software "environment." In an environment, the user has access not only to a large number of different "tools" (e.g. analyses, editors, other programs), models, and databases, but often a number of "utilities" and features in the environment that make it easier to go from one tool or model to another. Often these environments have a diversity of knowledge representations (procedural code, equations, text, rules) and languages. Many environments are extendable in at least a limited manner to the languages and information styles already available in the system. However, new languages and representations are being developed continuously for very good reasons as with mathematical formalisms, a good language can make certain problems easy to do.