OSNET-a language for domain modeling

Domain analysis and domain modeling has been proved to be an important technique for accelerating application development. The major step in this process is to convert requirement specification into an appropriate conceptual model of the wanted application software. The former is usually given in some form of natural language or pseudo natural language. The latter can be represented in one of various conceptual modeling languages, either graphic or symbolic. One of the major problems one encounters in this process is the big gap between the format of requirement specification and that of conceptual modeling. In order to easy this transform process, we propose a new type of conceptual modeling language OSNET which combines the semantic network representation with the object oriented paradigm. Thus it has both advantages of representing natural language style specification and object oriented style implementation. OSNET has been implemented and used in our projects for developing knowledge based software prototyping tools.