Sharing and Searching History: Collaborative Component and Data Reuse

A great number of Internet users are contributing their own software and data to the Internet community. Since the number is quite large, their potential usefulness is quite great. Their availability, however, is low because they are produced in unorganized and uncoordinated manner by a lot of individual contributors. A lot of data and software exist basically unclassified, often continuously updated, poorly documented. One would experience difficulty in finding desired software or data, in learning the usage, or in converting data formats. In this paper, a framework for weakly collaborative software and data reuse is presented. We focus on the "functional" software that generates data by processing input data. By combining such software components, a variety of tasks can be realized. In the framework, users weakly collaborate by sharing the history graph that is the accumulation of the records of data processing (component application) they have done. Searching through and referring to the history graph as abundant examples, one can find desired data or component and can learn typical usages. A prototype system based on this framework is described