Thesaurus-Based Software Environments

Introduction Software environments support the process of constructing and maintaining application systems. This paper describes the idea of a thesaurus 1 as a viable foundation for software environments. A thesaurus contains information about the names and identifiers in all the software written in all the languages of an application. Information about extensional data in a database or persistent store is also included. The comprehensiveness of the thesaurus is in contrast to most commercially available tools which focus either on the source code only (source code analysers) or on database-specific information (data dictionaries). A few data dictionary tools also include source code information, but relationships between names and identifiers in the software written in the various languages are not recorded automatically. All the contents of the thesaurus are automatically maintained. The whole application system is anal