On staying grounded and avoiding Quixotic dead ends

The 15 articles in this special issue on The Representation of Concepts illustrate the rich variety of theoretical positions and supporting research that characterize the area. Although much agreement exists among contributors, much disagreement exists as well, especially about the roles of grounding and abstraction in conceptual processing. I first review theoretical approaches raised in these articles that I believe are Quixotic dead ends, namely, approaches that are principled and inspired but likely to fail. In the process, I review various theories of amodal symbols, their distortions of grounded theories, and fallacies in the evidence used to support them. Incorporating further contributions across articles, I then sketch a theoretical approach that I believe is likely to be successful, which includes grounding, abstraction, flexibility, explaining classic conceptual phenomena, and making contact with real-world situations. This account further proposes that (1) a key element of grounding is neural reuse, (2) abstraction takes the forms of multimodal compression, distilled abstraction, and distributed linguistic representation (but not amodal symbols), and (3) flexible context-dependent representations are a hallmark of conceptual processing

An Exploratory Study of Forces and Frictions affecting Large-Scale Model-Driven Development

In this paper, we investigate model-driven engineering, reporting on an exploratory case-study conducted at a large automotive company. The study consisted of interviews with 20 engineers and managers working in different roles. We found that, in the context of a large organization, contextual forces dominate the cognitive issues of using model-driven technology. The four forces we identified that are likely independent of the particular abstractions chosen as the basis of software development are the need for diffing in software product lines, the needs for problem-specific languages and types, the need for live modeling in exploratory activities, and the need for point-to-point traceability between artifacts. We also identified triggers of accidental complexity, which we refer to as points of friction introduced by languages and tools. Examples of the friction points identified are insufficient support for model diffing, point-to-point traceability, and model changes at runtime.Comment: To appear in proceedings of MODELS 2012, LNCS Springe

Reconciling a component and process view

In many cases we need to represent on the same abstraction level not only system components but also processes within the system, and if for both representation different frameworks are used, the system model becomes hard to read and to understand. We suggest a solution how to cover this gap and to reconcile component and process views on system representation: a formal framework that gives the advantage of solving design problems for large-scale component systems.Comment: Preprint, 7th International Workshop on Modeling in Software Engineering (MiSE) at ICSE 201

Consistency in Multi-Viewpoint Architectural Design of Enterprise Information Systems

Different stakeholders in the design of an enterprise information system have their own view on that design. To help produce a coherent design this paper presents a framework that aids in specifying relations between such views. To help produce a consistent design the framework also aids in specifying consistency rules that apply to the view relations and in checking the consistency according to those rules. The framework focuses on the higher levels of abstraction in a design, we refer to design at those levels of abstraction as architectural design. The highest level of abstraction that we consider is that of business process design and the lowest level is that of software component design. The contribution of our framework is that it provides a collection of basic concepts that is common to viewpoints in the area of enterprise information systems. These basic concepts aid in relating viewpoints by providing: (i) a common terminology that helps stakeholders to understand each others concepts; and (ii) a basis for defining re-usable consistency rules. In particular we define re-usable rules to check consistency between behavioural views that overlap or are a refinement of each other. We also present an architecture for a tool suite that supports our framework. We show that our framework can be applied, by performing a case study in which we specify the relations and consistency rules between the RM-ODP enterprise, computational and information viewpoints

A knowledge-based approach to VLSI-design in an open CAD-environment

A knowledge-based approach is suggested to assist a designer in the increasingly complex task of generating VLSI-chips from abstract, high-level specifications of the system. The complexity of designing VLSI-circuits has reached a level where computer-based assistance has become indispensable. Not all of the design tasks allow for algorithmic solutions. AI technique can be used, in order to support the designer with computer-aided tools for tasks not suited for algorithmic approaches. The approach described in this paper is based upon the underlying characteristics of VLSI design processes in general, comprising all stages of the design. A universal model is presented, accompanied with a recording method for the acquisition of design knowledge - strategic and task-specific - in terms of the design actions involved and their effects on the design itself. This method is illustrated by a simple design example: the implementation of the logical EXOR-component. Finally suggestions are made for obtaining a universally usable architecture of a knowledge-based system for VLSI-design

Refactoring pattern matching

Defining functions by pattern matching over the arguments is advantageous for understanding and reasoning, but it tends to expose the implementation of a datatype. Significant effort has been invested in tackling this loss of modularity; however, decoupling patterns from concrete representations while maintaining soundness of reasoning has been a challenge. Inspired by the development of invertible programming, we propose an approach to program refactoring based on a right-invertible language rinv—every function has a right (or pre-) inverse. We show how this new design is able to permit a smooth incremental transition from programs with algebraic datatypes and pattern matching, to ones with proper encapsulation, while maintaining simple and sound reasoning

A Rigorous Approach to Relate Enterprise and Computational Viewpoints

Multiviewpoint approaches allow stakeholders to design a system from stakeholder-specific viewpoints. By this, a separation of concerns is achieved, which makes designs more manageable. However, to construct a consistent multiviewpoint design, the relations between viewpoints must be defined precisely, so that the consistency of designs from these viewpoints can be verified. The goal of this paper is to make the consistency rules between (a slightly adapted version of) the RM-ODP enterprise and computational viewpoints more precise and to make checking the consistency between these viewpoints practically applicable. To achieve this goal, we apply a generic framework for relating viewpoints that includes reusable consistency rules. We implemented the consistency rules in a tool to show their applicability