Multiperspective analysis of the sisyphus-I room allocation task modelled in a CG Meta-Representation language

Abstract

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1999. Different participants in system development often hold partial specifications of the knowledge relating to the system being developed. To reflect this, the system may be developed through ‘perspectives’ to make such information more manageable. The ViewPoints framework [1] offers a way of dealing with the partitioning and the organization of perspectives entailed in system development. ViewPoints represent “agents” having “roles-in” and “views-of” a problem domain. We are using conceptual graphs (CGs) as a meta-representation language to describe ViewPoints in order to facilitate reasoning about the partitioned knowledge that each ViewPoint represents. The established notations and operations of CGs provide a strong foundation for this purpose. This paper presents the applicability of ViewPoints together with a CG meta-representation language for the knowledge acquisition activities of the Sisyphus-I room allocation task. The paper provides an illustrative case study of our ongoing work on CG application to the area of software engineering [2]. Although the Sisyphus-I room allocation task is not a natural fit with the ViewPoints framework which aims at different tasks, we have made an attempt to apply it and believe that there are some interesting lessons.