Towards a Standardized Specification Framework for Component Development, Discovery, and Configuration

This paper proposes a standardized framework for the specification of components, which focuses on providing the information necessary to facilitate component development, discovery, as well as configuration. To be applicable in all these domains it predetermines a mix of different specification aspects and thereby prefers well-established formal notations to denote specifications. The framework orders component specifications using a thematic grouping into different pages, which are respectively subdivided into aspects. Currently, it provides general and commercial information (white pages), component classifications (yellow pages), as well as information about the component functionality (blue pages), the external component structure (green pages), and the quality of the component implementation (grey pages). The blue pages focus on providing a lexicon of implemented domain-related concepts (the domain model), the green pages comprise contractually specified interfaces, and the grey pages contain extra-functional attributes according to the ISO 9126 quality framework.