sth@itd.dsto.oz.au (Stephen Hood) (03/16/91)
It has been suggested that "paraphrasing" a "formal" specification into
natural language is one way to make a specification accessible for
validation by somone familiar with the application domain but not with
the formalism used for specification. For example, relationships and
constraints captured in an Entity-Relationship model might be used to
generate text such as:
"All aircraft are mobile-objects. Each aircraft has one pilot. Each
aircraft is in at most one airspace."[1]
[1] G. B. Williams and J. J. Myers "Exploiting metamodel
correspondences to provide paraphrasing capabilities for the KBSA
Concept Demonstration project", Proceedings 5th Annual KBSA Conference,
Syracuse, N.Y., September 1990
Local comments on the value of doing this (from computing types) have
included (paraphrased):
- "Users find diagramatic notations (such as ER) just as easy to
understand as text."
- "Maybe text would assist lawyers to argue over the requirement spec."
- "I once wrote a text generator for a BRM (NIAM) system but the Navy users
learned the diagrammatic notation very quickly so the text generator was
not used."
I am not suggesting that the alternative is to expose users to esoteric
notations such as Z. I am interested specifically in the value of
natural language text as a medium (and not necessarily the only one)
for validation of specifications by users or application-domain experts.
I would be pleased to receive opinions, particularly those grounded in
experience, or pointers to any published studies and will summarise to
the net.
Stephen Hood ----------------
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