iFUSE—Integrated Fuselet Synthesis Environment

A key concept in net-centric information spaces is that of the fuselet, a light-weight, special-purpose, autonomous client program that provides value-added information processing functions under the control of the information platform. Fuselets interact solely with the information space, and do not read from or write to external files or data sources. Further, fuselets do not have a user interface; they are executed within the information platform and managed by information management (IM) staff.

Typical information spaces will contain many fuselets, perhaps dozens or hundreds, to transform raw data into knowledge. The "information application" driven by fuselets will typically be designed by domain experts, not programmers. Throughout the lifecycle of the information system, IM staff may need to revise fuselets, remove out-of-date fuselets, or create new fuselets. In doing so, they must be able to develop a global picture of the community of interacting fuselets currently running, as well as those fuselets available for re-use or revision should it be needed.

With support from the Air Force Research Laboratory, ATC-NY has developed iFUSE, a fuselet development and analysis environment aimed at both the domain expert and expert programmer alike. iFUSE is based on the principle that fuselet designers are primarily interested in information and its transformation, not in the "how" or the code required to make the transformation. In addition, domain experts designing fuselets may not be well-versed in the concurrency problems, deadlock, and other issues that can arise in a community of asynchronous fuselets. iFUSE permits domain experts to develop individual fuselets easily, via a drag-and-drop graphical environment, and supports information engineering by visualizing and analyzing a collection of fuselets in context. In infospheres containing many fuselets, iFUSE also provides tools to examine individual fuselets' roles, graphically showing the ultimate producers and consumers of its data ("fuselet slicing").