The goal of the information analysis process is to derive the information grammar which describes the communication language within some application domain. This process involves both domain experts and system analysts. Since good communication between these two partners is essential, a proper common language should be chosen. Natural language seems to be a good candidate for this purpose. Two essential activities of the analysis process are modeling the application domain, and validating the resulting models. In this paper the focus is on validation. We consider objectoriented analysis models and paraphrase them by sentences in natural language. The paraphrasing process is automatically supported by the Grammar Workbench using the AGFL formalism to describe the information grammar. This results in a prototype for paraphrasing analysis models. Keywords: object-oriented analysis, natural language, information grammar, validation, paraphrasing, AGFL. Classification: AMS-1991 68Q5, 68P99...

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As conceptual models are both the result of and subject to communication between domain experts and information analysts, it is of the highest importance to explicitly relate conceptual models to the language in which they are communicated. To achieve this, we identify a set of semantic primitives in a suitable conceptual modelling framework and present the prototype of a knowledge extraction tool which helps analysts to find useful primitives in free natural language texts. In addition we suggest possible extensions of the presented approach to other phases of conceptual modelling.

The requirements analysis process is essential to software development. The success or failure of a software system can be said to largely depend on the quality of this activity. A formal and disciplined process is therefore necessary for requirements analysis. In this paper, we present an approach that is based on the formal definition of relations between linguistic and OO conceptual structures as a basis for a formal and disciplined problem analysis process. This process is based on two components, conceptual model formalization and OO model construction. The first provides formal rules to identify the key components of conceptual models, and the second, provides a set of definite steps to guide the analyst in model construction. We also present some conclusions concerning the application of our approach versus the standard OMT approach by a group of students at our university. 5 1. INTRODUCTION Perhaps the most critical factor in software system development is understanding and ...

In this paper the notion of logbook is introduced as a common basis for various models to be produced during system analysis. A logbook has a unifying format which contains a complete description of the history of some Universe of Discourse. It is intended as a structuring mechanism for initial specifications based on natural language. A typing mechanism is provided as an abstraction mechanism for logbook instances, leading to object oriented analysis models. Keywords: object-oriented modeling, natural language based conceptual modeling, information grammar, logbook Classification: 68P99 (AMS-1991), D.2.1 (CR-1991) Contents 1 Introduction 3 2 Logbooks 4 2.1 Informal specifications : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 4 2.2 Meta-model of a logbook : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 4 2.3 Logbook functions : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 6 2.4 Properties of a logbook : : : : : : : : ...

One of the main limitations attributed to Object Orientation (OO) by software engineers is the immaturity of the Object-Oriented Analysis (OOA) process. This article aims to propose a method to formalize this process. This method is based on the use of linguistic information from informal specifications. This information is composed of words which, in turn, denote elements of an OO modelling, such as classes, properties, etc. These words have a particular meaning, and their use in the modelling is usually related with that meaning. So, the objective is to analyse this information from the semantic and syntactic viewpoint and extract, by means of a formal procedure, the components of an OO system. These components are represented by one model that contains the static part of the system and another one that describes system behaviour 1. INTRODUCTION In view of the important benefits offered by OO [4][12], the software engineering community has looked back to this paradigm. However, the...

: This paper attempts to define the role and the constraints of Natural Language (NL) interpretation within the Requirement Engineering (RE) process. In so doing, it addresses two key features of a NL interpretation tool. First, genericity towards the design modelling language targeted by the interpretation can be supported owing to the semantic level of analysis of the input scenario. Genericity allows to interpret any kind of textual scenario into any kind of target design model. The second characteristic of the interpretation tool is its modularity which permits to automate partly RE tasks. Tightly embedded in the RE process, the interpretation becomes a powerful support that participates efficiently to the automation of numerous RE tasks. We illustrate this feature with an example making use of the interpretation tool for the improvement of the consistency between sequence diagrams and textual scenarios. 1. Introduction Design modelling languages (e.g. Entity Relationship, sequence...

The paper argues that the conventional methods for object oriented analysis and conceptual modeling suffer from lacks in requirements elicitation and validation by the end-user. Therefore, an intermediate level called `conceptual predesign ' is introduced between natural language requirements specification and conceptual design. The paper introduces the basic notions of a conceptual predesign model and discusses heuristic rules for their automatic mapping to the conceptual level, e.g. to UML.

This paper focuses on the potential role of the Object-Role Modeling (ORM) approach to information modeling for the task of domain modeling. Domain modeling concerns obtaining and modeling the language (concepts, terminologies, ontologies) used by stakeholders to talk about a domain. Achieving conceptual clarity and consensus among stakeholders is an important yet often neglected part of system development, and requirements engineering in particular.

In this article we discuss an approach to database optimisation in which a conceptual schema is optimised by applying a sequence of transformations. By performing these optimisations on the conceptual schema, a large part of the database optimisation can be done before actually sliding down the software development waterfall.