John Mylopoulos
Matthias Jarke
Abstract
We describe Telos, a language intended to support the development of information systems. The design principles for the language are based on the premise that information system development is knowledge intensive and that the primary responsibility of any language intended for the task is to be able to formally represent the relevent knowledge. Accordingly, the proposed language is founded on concepts from knowledge representations. Indeed, the language is appropriate for representing knowledge about a variety of worlds related to a particular information system, such as the subject world (application domain), the usage world (user models, environments), the system world (software requirements, design), and the development world (teams, metodologies).
We introduce the features of the language through examples, focusing on those provided for desribing metaconcepts that can then be used to describe knowledge relevant to a particular information system. Telos' fetures include an object-centered framework which supports aggregation, generalization, and classification; a novel treatment of attributes; an explicit representation of time; and facilities for specifying integrity constraints and deductive rules. We review actual applications of the language through further examples, and we sketch a formalization of the language.
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Index Terms
- Telos: representing knowledge about information systems
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Reviews
Klaus K. Obermeier
Telos is a language for developing information systems. The basic idea behind Telos is to create a semantically and syntactically rich environment for transparently and efficiently encoding the knowledge needed to build metamodels for software engineering and database access. While the attempt to delineate the knowledge necessary for creating and maintaining information systems—the authors distinguish subject, usage, system, and development “worlds”—is certainly worthwhile, the paper is a continuation of such orthodox ideas as semantic networks and frames. Consequently, Telos has inherited the eclectic nature of arbitrary relations of the nodes within semantic networks. It has kept the flavor of a system whose features are determined by clever syntax, but which lacks a rich enough semantics. Moreover, Telos is similar to Chandrasekaran's work on creating metalanguages for specific areas of problem solving (such as diagnosis and manufacturing) [1]. Chandrasekaran's work originated in the medical domain. His ideas were based on the assumption that every problem-solving activity warrants a metalanguage capturing the idiosyncrasies of its domain. Unfortunately, most approaches to knowledge representation, be they domain-specific, problem-solving specific, or multipurpose, have turned out to be successful theoretical undertakings rather than breakthroughs in implementation. Granted, the task of creating, maintaining, and especially using knowledge bases is gigantic. The authors have laid the groundwork for an interesting way of dealing with the issue related to information systems. What is needed now is a scalable system that proves their points.
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