The Ensemble Project

The Ensemble Project, the successor to Pan, was a research effort in the Computer Science Division of the University of California, Berkeley and was active from 1989 to 1997. The principal investigators were Professors Susan L. Graham and Michael Harrison.

We investigated the use of the latest programming language technology for the task of software construction and maintenance. Our ultimate goal was a high quality development environment emphasizing the editing and integration of all artifacts of the software life cycle: programs, documentation, specification, performance analyses, etc., as well as the creation and maintenance of software content.

Software artifacts are regarded as structured multimedia documents, where the structure and semantics are essential to understanding the document content. Advances in incremental analysis and maintenance of document structure, semantics, and content allowed us to develop new technology for editing structured documents and presenting multimedia.