Fuselets: Lightweight applications for information manipulation

Information management draws upon many disciplines including the collection of information needs, acquisition of information, information assessment, dissemination of information, and control of a managed information space. This paper introduces the general notions of information management in the large and the facet of information management known as manipulation, and provides an in-depth discussion of an advanced technology prototype implementation for the managment of lightweight applications known as "fuselets" that perform value-added information processing functions over the manaced information space. A fuselet is a light-weight, special-purpose Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) client that provides value-added functions for information processing that are under the control of the JBI platform services. The information processing functions take existing information objects within the JBI information space as input and manipulate them in a specified manner to produce new information objects. Information manipulations performed by fuselets typically satisfy the recurring information needs that are found to be common across multiple Communities of Interest (COIs), but are also often customized or developed from scratch to satisfy the immediate needs of a specific COI or information consumer for which there is no other readily available solution. This paper will discuss the overall fuselet system architecture and a developmental prototype that establishes an operational framework for fuselet execution and management.