TOM SAWYER SOFTWARE WINS NIST ATP AWARD

SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING NEWS

  Berkeley, Calif. -- Tom Sawyer Software has been selected as one of seven
grant awardees for Component-Based Software Technology  Development
(competition 95-09), from the Advanced Technology Program at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology.



  Founded in 1990, the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) invests directly in
the nation's economic growth by working with industry to develop innovative
technologies with strong commercial potential. The Advanced Technology
Program provides cost-shared funding for industries with high-risk R&D
projects with the potential to spark important, broad-based economic benefits
for the United States. The ATP accelerates, and in many cases enables,
potentially important R&D projects that industry would otherwise not
undertake because of the technical risks involved.



  ATP awards are made on the basis of a competitive review based on both
scientific and technical merit. The program in "Component-Based Software
Development" supports research on practical technologies. The program
emphasizes approaches based on semantic analysis of software components, so
that each component is automatically transformed at the point of use to be
compatible with the target market.



  Systems for engineering, database design, systems and network management,
telephony, project management, scheduling, work-flow management, software
engineering, financial systems management, chemical and biochemical design,
and others depend  on graphs to portray complex information. Graph drawing
theory is a growing  academic discipline, seeking algorithms that automate
the process of visualizing a graph to depict a particular set of data. While
academic papers have been published, it has  proven to be very difficult to
commercialize this research.



  "Tom Sawyer Software, a leading supplier of graph layout and editing tools
for the software industry, proposes to develop advanced software techniques
that bridge the existing gap between commercial graphing tools and theory,"
said Brendan P. Madden, president and CEO of Tom Sawyer Software.



  "We plan to do this by smoothly integrating techniques that enable
interactive and incremental editing of graphs with techniques for global
layout. The theory underlying this union is not yet well understood, but if
solved and captured in component-software tools, would bring major
improvements to a segment of software development that has been handicapped
by a lack of high-quality automated solutions," he added.



  Tom Sawyer Software will draw extensively on the resources of two leading
universities for graph drawing theory.



  Tom Sawyer Software is a tools development company that produces portable
graph layout systems, portable graph editors and finished applications for
specific market segments.