Evolutionary design and development of image meta-analysis environments based on object-relational database mediator technology

Discusses how emerging object-relational database mediator technology can be used to integrate academic freeware and commercial-off-the-shelf software components to create a sequence of gradually more complex and powerful, yet always syntactically and semantically homogeneous, database-centred image meta-analysis environments. We show how this may be done by defining and utilising a use-case-based evolutionary design and development process. This process allows subsystems to be produced largely independently by several small specialist subprojects, turning the system integration work into a high-level domain modelling task.