Middleware Case Study: MeDICi

Abstract

In many application domains in science and engineering, data produced by sensors, instruments, and networks is naturally processed by software applications structured as a pipeline. Pipelines comprise a sequence of software components that progressively process discrete units of data to produce a desired outcome. For example, in a Web crawler that is extracting semantics from text on Web sites, the first stage in the pipeline might be to remove all HTML tags to leave only the raw text of the document. The second step may parse the raw text to break it down into its constituent grammatical parts, such as nouns, verbs, and so on. Subsequent steps may look for names of people or places, interesting events or times so documents can be sequenced on a time line.