Proceedings of the 2001 Monterey Workshop (Sponsored by DARPA, ONR, ARO and AFOSR), pp: 109-119, Monterey, CA, 2001Distributed systems are omnipresent these days. Creating efficient and robust software for such systems is a highly complex task. One possible approach to developing distributed software is based on the integration of heterogeneous sofwtare components that are scattered across many machines. In this paper, a comprehensive framework that will allow a seamless integration of distributed heterogeneous software components is proposed. This framework involves: a) a metamodel for components and associated hierarchical setup for indicating the contracts and constraints of the components. b) an automatic generation of glues and wrappers, based on a designer's specifications, for achieving interoperability, c) a formal mechanism for precisely describing the meta-model, and d) a formalization of quality of service (QoS) offered by each component and ensemble of components. A case study from the domain of distributed information filtering is described in the context of this framework.This material is based upon work supported by, or in part by, the U.S. Office of Naval Research under award number N00014-01-1-0746. This material is based upon work supported by, or in part by, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office under contract/grant number 40473-MA
