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GCN Home > 03/10/03 issue

Tool integrates disparate apps on a single display

By Vandana Sinha, GCN Staff

A new integration system developed with Defense Department funding can fit the functions of incompatible back-end applications onto a single desktop screen.

The Professional Interactive Information Environment, or PiiE, is in use by several hundred employees at eight agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, Naval Research Laboratory and National Security Agency.

Digital Harbor Inc. of Annandale, Va., has begun selling PiiE to other agencies.

DOD asked Digital Harbor five years ago to devise a way to make its alphabet soup of applications, which run under 100 operating systems, available from a single terminal.

“Right now, data is horrendously disorganized,” said Scott Elliott, PiiE project manager at the Navy lab. “We have so many different platforms. None of them have any cross-interoperable capability whatsoever.”

Although Elliott wouldn’t mention specific apps, he gave a generic example of how the lab might use PiiE.

In different corners of his screen, he said, he might open a document about the history of al-Qaida terrorism, a mapping application, a streaming-video archive and a database of terrorist suspects.

He then could build links between the different information displays by dragging and dropping. Next, by clicking on a date in a document, say Sept. 11, the displays would change and bring up a map of Arlington, a video of the burning Pentagon, and a list of al-Qaida member backgrounds.

Slice of PiiE and Java2

PiiE consists of a component-based smart client that uses Java2 Enterprise Edition and Extensible Markup Language to correlate application functions through what Digital Harbor calls application linking and embedding.

It does so-called optimistic streaming via an inference engine and a set of relationships between application functions and data. One piece of server software acts as middleware for legacy apps. A second piece on the same or another server streams only as much of the apps to the desktop system as the user needs at the moment.