A look through PRISMA: towards pluralistic knowledge-based environments for software specification acquisition

A pluralistic attitude to software specification acquisition is proposed, where multiple viewpoints/formalisms are simultaneously used to describe more comprehensively the required system. Syntactic, semantic and pragmatic (heuristic) aspects of Entity Relationship Models, Data Flow Diagrams and Petri Nets are captured using Prolog as a metalanguage. More general heuristics indicating complementarity consistency between methods are also formal&d. The construction of PRISMA a pluralistic knowledge-based system is. described, and the approach is ilustrated via examples. Theoretical and practical issues related to specification processes and environments supporting a pluralistic paradigm are also discussed.