System abstraction and interface for interoperable SERVER objects in OMEGA

The OMEGA (Object-based Modeling Environment for Geoscientific Applications) system is intended to support geoscientific modeling tasks. In this paper, we emphasize those aspects of OMEGA that are relevant to the integration of distributed computational tools and objects. OMEGA is capable of delegating specialized computations to a variety of external packages through the SERVER objects and associated interface methods. In this sense, OMEGA may be viewed as a software coupling system into which existing packages and application-specific software may be plugged with minimal effort. Most of the engineering details of the coupling mechanism are encapsulated and automated for the end-user.<
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