Overview
Asset Locator is a low cost, low maintenance, scalable solution for managing development resources in the enterprise, which supports search and reuse, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and impact analysis. Throughout the software lifecycle, developers produce an enormous amount of software artifacts or 'development resources' such as design, code, documentation, test suites, and so forth. Asset Locator reaches configuration management systems, file systems, and other locations in which development resources are stored to find these resources, analyze their content, and create a library of reusable components. Asset Locator provides a set of integrated tools that enable developers to search for reusable code, view the inventory of the enterprise servers, and perform impact analysis activities.
How does it work?
Asset Locator uses a set of autonomous crawlers (e.g., CVS, ClearCase, File System) to crawl into the enterprise servers/repositories and incrementally find new development resources. Next, a set of domain-specific analyzers (e.g., Java, XML, JSP) analyze the discovered resources by identifying and extracting semantic and textual features, and categorizing them into predefined category taxonomies. The analyzed information is then stored in a DB2 database and the textual information is indexed again to enable quick retrieval of resources by keyword at runtime. Once the enterprise repositories have been mined and analyzed, additional analysis finds the relationships and dependencies between resources. This analysis provides a global view of the domain or the "big picture" of how resources fit together.
At runtime, Asset Locator provides a Semantic Search Service over the Web that enables users or applications to invoke queries against the analyzed information. Using the Search Service, users can query any of the features that were extracted by the analyzers or perform impact analysis activities. In addition, Asset Locator provides both graphical and non-graphical tools for navigating the relationships/dependencies between resources, and navigating the inventory of the discovered domain using a Yahoo-like category taxonomy.
Status
Asset Locator, developed by the IBM Haifa Research Labs, has been integrated into WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer and provides support for analyzing WebSphere Application Servers and Java applications.