This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will research the technical feasibility and commercial viability of an innovative interactive environment that supports an inductive analysis approach to unifying heterogeneous, distributed information systems. This innovation, called the Inductive Analysis Environment, will allow end users to develop abstract models of target domains by manipulating existing data and creating new relationships and attributes. By enabling end-users to manipulate representations of data objects while itself taking care of housekeeping tasks (such as connecting to data sources and converting data), the environment will allow users to essentially develop applications on the fly, making many of the traditional application development cycles unnecessary. After creating these new application contexts, users may then save them and share them in a multi-user, collaborative space. This process will represent a new kind of problem-solving environment. The Inductive Analysis Environment thus will introduce a new methodology for developing certain classes of information systems. This innovation will also enable seamless, end-user controlled integration of heterogeneous systems without requiring the intermediate steps of software development or data warehousing. By making many steps of the traditional software development process unnecessary, the Inductive Analysis Environment will make the creation of software applications a much higher- quality, more reliable process
