There is an attractive presentation about presenting knowledge from the various roles like practicians, software people, and scientists: How to tell stuff to the computer. It describes a triangle (see below), whose corners are practical domain knowledge (lower left corner), software artifacts (top corner) and science (low right corner). The picture proposes some technologies inside the triangle. The most important things in the triangle are – in writer’s opininion – the steps in the lines connecting corners.

In his/hers conclusion the writer forecasts that in future there is a revolution, caused by descriptive logics (see http://www.lisperati.com/tellstuff/conclusion.html). I warmly agree that conclusion, because logic has a very strong role in the framework of symbolic analysis.

Instead, it is difficult to see what is the beef in the desriptive logic here: http://www.lisperati.com/tellstuff/dl.html, the text contains traditional monolitic Lisp. However, the idea of the title: Marriage of Logic and Objects is a very good vision. I have had the same goal in the architecture of AHO hybrid objects. Furthermore, there is a solid contact surface between semantic web and symbolic analysis (see more).

Symbolic and holistic approach for estimating knowlege produced by the software

The triangle (above) is useful as a base for illlustrating software development and its knowledghe representation, too. In the lower triangle (see below) I have named the corners respectively: Domain knowlege, source of program and information system (IS) pragmatics caused by the software.

The last corner is not science as in the triangle about, but it simulates all purposes to understand the software and its value as an empiric product. The last corner is then an attempt to get empiric and practical research information from the implemented software. It is then a large approach. It has two sides:

problem specific approach supported by reverse engineering and holistic approach in order to evaluate the whole

There some essential roles in the figure. All essential information is thought to be stored into an imagined megamodel (specification, resource information, sprints, tests etc).

The three lines are:

The left line describes software development, to code. The line from top to the right lower corner is symbolic analysis containing the technology spaces: GrammarWare, ModelWare, SimulationWare and KnowledgeWare. For practical purposes there is a problem reasonign technology (PRT) close to the right corner. The bottom line is a problem, because there is no direct support for estimating how does a system satisfy all possible user needs, but there are some technologies to create end user services so that they can be mapped into code and remain visible in the system. SOA, aspects, Zachman architecture and metrics are some means for that purpose.

Some links: