Composing Knowledge Fragments: A Next Generation IDE.

When building a software system, software developers each contribute a flow of information that together forms the system. As they work, programmers continuously consult various facts (knowledge) about this information to answer their questions about the system. The knowledge most easily accessed today in a programming environment involves facts about the structure of the program. However, the knowledge required by a programmer is broader than just structure; it also includes knowledge about design, requirements, and the development process, to name just a few other sources. To enable developers to access this knowledge more efficiently, our goal is to develop a model for programming environments that allows various fragments of different kinds of knowledge to be configured flexibly. This model would enable new presentations to show these knowledge fragments in ways that more directly answer programmers’ questions.