Integration through meta-communication

It is argued that metacommunication, i.e. communication about communication rules, is a general integration methodology that is applicable to the integration of architectures, protocols, and systems. Efforts towards the development of an automated methodology for metacommunication are discussed. The author views metacommunication as a design problem. Metacommunicating entities exchange partially specified communication rules. Each entity, or a metacommunication center, applies a standard composition principle on the individual partially specified rules in order to derive the complete protocol architecture. A report is presented on an existing implementation of the metacommunication mechanism and on translators that transform the resulting specification into C code