Data sharing infrastructures to support legacy systems integration and reuse

In this era of corporate mergers and takeovers, a way to join legacy automation systems into new corporate wide information systems efficiently has become absolutely necessary. The military is facing similar problems within its inter-service and intra-service command and control systems as well as its automated administrative systems. It has become essential for both environments to easily share data between legacy systems, reuse their existing hardware and software, and be flexible enough to accept data from new systems quickly and cheaply.; This dissertation describes a new approach for integrating disparate systems through a common data sharing infrastructure. It proposes a solution to the problem of integrating new hardware and software systems with legacy hardware and software systems within similar domains. The approach addresses a class of problems being experienced in both the commercial and military environments. The problem facing both the commercial corporate environments, military command and control systems, and military administrative systems is how to reuse existing systems by seamlessly integrating them so their data and existing hardware and software can be easily reused and shared by all.; This dissertation documents a three year research and development effort geared toward solving the legacy systems integration, interoperability, and reuse problems currently being faced by military environments. This research and development effort was sponsored by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) within the DOD. All of the demonstrations, experiments, and tests associated with this research and development effort are geared toward investigating BMDO legacy hardware and software integration issues.; The proof-of-concept prototype developed under BMDO sponsorship is a solution to their legacy systems integration, interoperability, and reuse problem. While the prototype and its related experiments and tests are geared toward the sponsor, the association to a similar class of problems within the corporate environment is unmistakable. The prototype makes use of a behavioral Information Architecture based object-oriented data hierarchy, an object-oriented database, glue code, and data communications to create the distributed data sharing infrastructure that facilitates legacy systems integration in both the commercial and military environments.