Domain Theory: Practice and Theories A Discussion of Possible Research Topics

By a domain we mean a universe of discourse. Typical examples are (partially) man-made universes of discourse such as Air Traffic, Airports, Financial Services (banks, insurance companies, securities trading [brokers, traders, stock exchanges]), Health Care (hospitals etc.), Secure IT Systems (according to Intl. ISO/IEC Standard 17799), The Market (consumers, retailers, wholesalers, producers, “the supply chain”), Transportation (road, air, sea and/or rail transport), etc. We shall outline how one might describe such (infrastructure component) domains, informally and formally what the current descriptional limitations appear to be, and, hence, the prospects for future research as well as practice. The current paper is based on Part IV, Chaps. 8–16 of [3]. The volume is one of [1–3]. The aim of this paper is to suggest a number of areas of domain theory and methodology research. Maybe the title of the paper need be explained: The second part of the title: ‘Practice and Theories’ shall indicate that there is an engineering practice (i.e., methodology) of developing domain descriptions and that any such domain description forms the basis for a specific domain theory. The first part of the title: ‘Theories’ shall indicate that we need support the practice, i.e., the methodology, by theoretical insight, and that there probably are some theoretical insight that applies across some or all domain theories.