The OPHELIA Project: Supporting Software Development in a Distributed Environment

This short paper provides an introduction to the European Union funded OPHELIA (Open Platform and meTHodologies for deVELopment tools and IntegrAtion in a distributed environment) project (IST-2000-28402-2000-20002) that began in October 2001. OPHELIA aims to produce a platform definition that will support software engineering in a distributed environment and the integration of t oolsets across such an environment. The project consortium comprises partners from six countries (Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK) and is a test case for the platform. The platform intends to support the analysis and implementation phase of the software lifecycle. An additional project goal is the development of a methodology and a process for the optimisation of the software lifecycle in situations where modellers and software engineers are distributed over different sites. We provide an introduction to the aims and scope of the OPHELIA project and present an overview of the architecture in the context of our pilot implementation, ORPHEUS. Finally, we summarise our achievements to date and discuss some storage and interoperability issues raised during the development of the OPHELIA Modelling Module, which is one of the contributions from Heriot-Watt University.