SummaryThe ONCOCIN Interviewer program provides a graphical interface between physicians and an expert system that is designed to assist with therapy selection for patients receiving experimental cancer therapy. A principal goal has been to increase acceptance of advanced computer tools in a clinical setting. The interface has been developed for high-performance Lisp workstations and is tailored to the existing paper forms and practices of the outpatient clinic. To be flexible, the program makes use of a document formatting language to control a raster graphics display of medical forms, traditional paper versions of which have been used to track patient progress. The program utilizes a mouse input device coupled with a software-defined data entry approach that may be customized to the specific environment. The work described suggests ways in which high density graphics interfaces, with pointing devices rather than an emphasis on keyboards, may make decision support tools more useful to physicians and more acceptable to them.

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I. Introductionurrent mission operations systems are built as a collection of monolithic software applications. Each application C serves the needs of a specific user base associated with a discipline or functional role. Built to accomplish specific tasks, each application embodies specialized functional knowledge and has its own data storage, data models, programmatic interfaces, user interfaces, and customized business logic. In effect, each application creates its own walled-off environment. While individual applications are sometimes reused across multiple missions, it is expensive and time consuming to maintain these systems, and both costly and risky to upgrade them in the light of new requirements or modify them for new purposes. It is even more expensive to achieve new integrated activities across a set of monolithic applications.These problems impact the lifecycle cost (especially design, development, testing, training, maintenance, and integration) of each new mission operations system. They also inhibit system innovation and evolution. This in turn hinders NASA's ability to adopt new operations paradigms, including increasingly automated space systems, such as autonomous rovers, autonomous onboard crew systems, and integrated control of human and robotic missions. Hence, in order to achieve NASA's vision affordably and reliably, we need to consider and mature new ways to build mission controi systems that overcome the problems inherent in systems of monolithic applications. The keys to the solution are modularity and interoperabilify. Modularity will increase extensibility (evolution), reusability, and maintainability. Interoperability will enable composition of larger systems out of smaller parts, and enable the construction of new integrated activities that tie together, at a deep level, the capabilities of many of the components. Modularity and interoperability together contribute to flexibility.The Mission Control Technologies (MCT) Project, a collaboration of multiple NASA Centers, led by NASA Ames Research Center, is building a framework to enable software to be assembled from flexible collections of components and services. BackgroundThe need for MCT became apparent during software development, user observation, and user requests from the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission operations technology infusion projects, in which Ames and the Jet

+1 650 604 2005 +1 650 604 1250 +1 650 604 3114 jdwalton @ arc.nasa.gov rfilman @arc.nasa.gov dkorsmeyer@ arc.nasa.gov ABSTRACT DARWIN is a web-based system for presenting the results of wind-tunnel testing and computational model analyses to aerospace designers. DARWIN captures the data, maintains the information, and manages derived knowledge (e.g. visualizations) of large quantities of aerospace data. In addition, it provides tools and an environment for distributed collaborative engineering.We are currently constructing the third version of the DARWIN software system. DARWIN's development history has, in some sense, tracked the development of web applications. The 1995 DARWIN reflected the latest web technologies--CGI scripts, Java applets and a threelayer architecture--available at that time. The 1997 version of DARWIN expanded on this base, making extensive use of a plethora of web technologies, including Java/JavaScript and Dynamic HTML. While more powerful, this multiplicity has proven to be a maintenance and development headache. The 2000 version of DARWIN will provide a more stable and uniform foundation environment, composed primarily of Java mechanisms. In this paper, we discuss this evolution, comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the various architectural approaches and describing the lessons learned about building complex web applications.