The Use of a Domain Model in Understanding Informal Process Descriptions

I N T R O D U C T I O N The SAFE project [Balzer 77] at ISI is constructing a computer model which exhibits certain aspects of process understanding. SAFE accepts a written, pseudo-English process descript ion and produces a formal specification of the described process. The resulting specification is encoded in a language wi th formal syntax and semantics. The process is specified in operational terms in this language. In this sense the formal specification resembles a computer program, although it does not incorporate commitments to data representation or considerations of input/output, and thus is not suitable as a software implementation. This lack of commitment makes the formal specification a useful object for reasoning about the behavior of the process, however, since implementation details necessitated by programming languages, efficiency considerations, and the architecture of digital computers are not an inherent part of the specification.