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Domains in the OO Community

For people from the OO world, the concept of domain is interpreted differently and serves a different function. However, the assignment of the domain to the "real world" is similar to the AI case. As OOP has been pushed upstream into design and analysis, practitioners have attempted to use OO representations to describe not only internal data structures and program elements, but real-world entities. The term domain analysis has appeared in OO literature, most often connoting "analyzing the objects and operations in the real world."

OO developers seem to work on the basis of these assumptions:

The OO community seems to have had little need to date for explicit recognition of the "multiple world settings/multiple system solutions" issue; that is, a single-point OO solution for a given client is not different in kind, only in degree, from building a set of OO components, etc. to be used in building multiple applications. To some extent the AI community shares the same blind spot, although there has been recognition of problems like reconciling knowledge obtained from multiple, conflicting sources of expertise. This seems to point to one contribution the systematic reuse community could make, if we can get beyond the semantic breakdowns that occur when trying to compare techniques across the various communities.



Larry Latour
Sat Oct 7 22:45:23 EDT 1995