{"title":"Adding more \"DL\" to IDL: towards more knowledgeable component inter-operability","authors":"Alexander Borgida, Premkumar T. Devanbu","doi":"10.1145/302405.302660","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In an open component market place, interface description languages (IDLs), such as CORBA's, provide for the consumer only a weak guarantee (concerning type signatures) that a software service will work in a particular context as anticipated. Stronger guarantees, regarding the intended semantics of the service, would help, especially if formalized in a language that allowed effective, automatic and static checking of compatibility between the server and the client's service descriptions. We propose an approach based on a family of formalisms called description logics (DLs), providing three examples of the use of DLs to augment IDL: (1) for the CORBA Cos Relationship service; (2) for capturing information models described using STEP Express, the ISO standard language used in the manufacturing domain (and a basis of the OMG PDM effort); and (3) constraints involving methods. While traditional formal specification techniques are more powerful, DLs offer certain advantages: they have decidable, even efficient reasoning algorithms, yet they still excel at modeling natural domains, and are thus well-suited for specifying application and domain-specific services.","PeriodicalId":359367,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Software Engineering (IEEE Cat. No.99CB37002)","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"1999-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"47","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Software Engineering (IEEE Cat. No.99CB37002)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/302405.302660","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 47
Abstract
In an open component market place, interface description languages (IDLs), such as CORBA's, provide for the consumer only a weak guarantee (concerning type signatures) that a software service will work in a particular context as anticipated. Stronger guarantees, regarding the intended semantics of the service, would help, especially if formalized in a language that allowed effective, automatic and static checking of compatibility between the server and the client's service descriptions. We propose an approach based on a family of formalisms called description logics (DLs), providing three examples of the use of DLs to augment IDL: (1) for the CORBA Cos Relationship service; (2) for capturing information models described using STEP Express, the ISO standard language used in the manufacturing domain (and a basis of the OMG PDM effort); and (3) constraints involving methods. While traditional formal specification techniques are more powerful, DLs offer certain advantages: they have decidable, even efficient reasoning algorithms, yet they still excel at modeling natural domains, and are thus well-suited for specifying application and domain-specific services.