Towards an Epistemology for Software Representations

Christopher A. Welty

Computer Science Dept.
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601
weltyc@cs.vassar.edu

The KBSE community is actively engaged in finding ways to represent software and the activities that relate to various stages in its lifecycle. While the wealth of modeling activities have, necessarily, been founded on first order logic based representations, this paper reports on research into Software Information Systems that has found the domain of software knowledge to be inherently second order. A facility for accurately representing second order constructs such as are found in the software domain is also presented.

Content Areas: Knowledge Representation, Domain Modeling, Software Information Systems.

1 - Introduction

2 - First Order Representations

2.1 - Classes, Instances, and Links
2.2 - Superclass Inheritance
2.3 - Identifying Non-First Order Objects
2.3.1 - Instances of Instances
2.3.2 - Links between Classes
2.4 - Extensions to First Order Systems
2.4.1 - Smalltalk Meta-Classes
2.4.2 - Classic Meta-Individuals

3 - Representing Software

3.1 - Objects in the Application Domain
3.2 - Objects in the Software Domain
3.3 - Integrating the Code and Domain Models

4 - Spanning Objects

4.1 - Integrating Models Revisited
4.2 - Epistemology

5 - Conclusion

Acknowledgments

References

Epistemology for Software Representations - 01 MAY 95

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