medium . INFOHARNESS : Managing Distributed , Heterogeneous Information

T oday, important information is scattered in so many places, formats, and media, that getting the right information at the right time and place is an extremely difficult task. Developing a single software product, for example, includes the creation of documents ranging from the requirements specification and project schedules to marketing presentations , multimedia tutorials, and more. Each document may be created by a different person using a different tool, and each may be stored in a different place. InfoHarness is an information integration system, platform, and tool set that addresses these problems, managing huge amounts of heterogeneous information in a distributed environment. Through a powerful, consistent user interface, InfoHarness provides rapid search of and access to information assets including documents and parts of documents, mail messages, images, code files, video clips, Web pages with URLs, InfoHar-ness queries, and views of relational tables. The system makes all these arti-facts available without relocating, restructuring, or reformatting the data. Instead, InfoHarness associates each original artifact with an extensi-ble set of metadata—for example, the artifact's type, location, access rights, owner, and creation date. Using the metadata, the system rapidly, and largely automatically, creates information repositories accessible through any HTTP-compliant browser. Users can browse or query a repository for items of interest. In this article, we explain the InfoHarness approach to metadata extraction and heterogeneous information management. We also describe Visu-alHarness, which extends the basic system to accommodate visual data. Finally, we describe how to use InfoHarness tools and hooks to create other Web-based, information-intensive applications.