Current and future (conventional) notations used in Conceptual Modeling Techniques should have a precise (formal) semantics to provide a well-defined software development process, in order to go from specification to implementation in an automated way. To achieve this objective, the OO-Method approach to InformationSnform Modeling presented in this paper attempts to overcome the conventional (informal)/formal dichotomy by selecting the best ideas from both approaches. The OO-Method makes a clear distinction between the problem space (centered on what the system is) and the solution space (centered on how it is implemented as a software product). It provides a precise, conventional graphical notation to obtain a system description at the problem space level, however this notation is strictly based on a formal OO specification language that determines the conceptual modeling constructs needed to obtain the system specification. An abstract execution model determines how to obtain the software representations corresponding to these conceptual modeling constructs. In this way, the final software product can be obtained in an automated way. r 2001 ElsevierS ien e Ltd. All rights reserved.

. Current Object-oriented Design (OOD) methodologies tend to focus on objects as the unit of reuse, but it is increasingly recognised that frameworks, or groups of interacting objects, are a better unit of reuse. Thus, in next-generation Component-based Development (CBD) methodologies, we can expect components to be frameworks rather than objects. In this paper, we describe a preliminary attempt at a formal semantics for OOD frameworks in CBD in computational logic. 1 Introduction Most of the existing (semi-formal) Object-oriented Design (OOD) methods such as Fusion [4, 6] and Syntropy [5] use classes or objects as the basic unit of design or reuse. These methods are based on the traditional view of an object, as shown in Figure 1, which regards an object as a closed entity with one fixed role. visible functions structure internal encapsulated Fig. 1. Traditional view of an object. This, however, does not reflect the nature of objects (and classes that describe them) in practical syst...

. In component-based software development, object-oriented design (OOD) frameworks are increasingly recognised as better units of reuse than objects. This is because OOD frameworks are groups of interacting objects, and as such they can better reect practical systems in which objects tend to have more than one role in more than one context. In an earlier paper, we described a formal semantics of the static aspects of OOD frameworks in computational logic. In this paper, we make a preliminary attempt to extend this to the dynamic aspects. 1 Introduction In [12, 13] we present a formalisation of Object-Oriented Design (OOD) frameworks in component-based software development (CBD) in computational logic. Such frameworks are groups of (interacting) objects. For example, in the CBD methodology Catalysis [6], a driver may be represented as the OOD framework shown in Figure 1. 1 A driver is a person who drives a car, or in OOD termiCar Person Driver drives Fig. 1. The Driver OO...

In component-based software development, object-oriented design (OOD) frameworks are increasingly recognised as better units of reuse than objects. This is because OOD frameworks are groups of interacting objects, and as such they can better reflect practical systems in which objects tend to have more than one role in more than one context. In this paper, we show how to formally specify OOD frameworks, and briefly discuss their implementation and configuration management.

In [13, 14, 10] we present a formalisation of OOD frameworks (i.e. groups of interacting objects) in component-based software development (CBD) in computational logic. In that formalisation, the only form of interactions between objects are associations (relations) between objects, and operations on objects which only affect their local state. However, in practical systems, an OOD framework F also needs to express operations between objects within F , as well as operations between F and other frameworks. In this paper we extend our formalisation to such intra- and inter-OOD-framework interactions. These interactions are called joint actions in the CBD methodology Catalysis, and we illustrate our formalisation by means of a Catalysis example.