Pattern reification as the basis for descriptiond

Authors: Florida Estrella Zsolt Kovacs JeanMarie Le Goff Richard McClatchey Tony Solomonides Norbert Toth

Publish Date: 2003/07/01

Volume: 2, Issue: 2, Pages: 108-119

PDF Link

Abstract

One of the main factors driving objectoriented software development for information systems is the requirement for systems to be tolerant to change To address this issue in designing systems this paper proposes a patternbased objectoriented descriptiondriven system DDS architecture as an extension to the standard UML fourlayer metamodel A DDS architecture is proposed in which aspects of both static and dynamic systems behavior can be captured via descriptive models and metamodels The proposed architecture embodies four main elements – firstly the adoption of a multilayered metamodeling architecture and reflective metalevel architecture secondly the identification of four data modeling relationships that can be made explicit such that they can be modified dynamically thirdly the identification of five design patterns which have emerged from practice and have proved essential in providing reusable building blocks for data management and fourthly the encoding of the structural properties of the five design patterns by means of one fundamental pattern the Graph pattern A practical example of this philosophy the CRISTAL project is used to demonstrate the use of descriptiondriven data objects to handle system evolution

Keywords: