Adding more "DL" to IDL: towards more knowledgeable component inter-operability

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.