SBIR-STTR Award

Large, complex organizations such as the United States Air Force (USAF) must use, manage, and administer software systems which are massive in size, international in scope and complex in operation. These USAF systems have evolved over a period of time, were written in different languages, have obscure relationships, and serve purposes that may be hard to visualize. This leads to a lack of understanding of the enterprise data and its attendant relationshipswhich makes any system modernization or interoperability effort a particularly demanding challenge.There is a need for the development of a semi-automated approach to quickly analyze the syntax and semantics of the current data environment from structured and unstructured information and evolve it for system interoperability and modernization.Connote is a technology which uses innovative concepts such semantic web technologies, ontologies, code parsers, and analysis capabilities to ingest, parse, and display the contents, relationships, and structure of legacy software.This technology can be evolved and leveraged to meet the needs of the USAF for legacy system replacement or integration.legacy systems,systems integration,System Replacement,semantic web,model-based systems engineering

The US Government spends upwards of $50 Billion a year maintaining legacy systems. Replacing these systems can be a challenge. Legacy software systems can be huge, evolving over time, developed and maintained by a different team every few years. There may be documentation, or there may not be. If there is, it may be poor quality or unmaintained. Cyber security and data breaches are difficult to address in these systems. And system interoperability is especially challenging in domains where mergers and acquisitions create overlaps in functionality that must be deconflicted. Connote is a software analysis engine designed to automatically parse, analyze, and model complex software systems. Connote is designed to address classic problems with maintaining legacy systems – problems that are so systemic that they have always been assumed to be inherent to the software development lifecycle. Connote allows engineers to quickly gain a deep understanding of what a system does, how it works, and how independent systems are interconnected. This analysis is fully interactive – fidelity can be scaled up and down, scopes and relationships can be traced, functional and structural relationships separated, and irrelevant information can be identified and ed.