An Overview of Reflection and Its Use in Cooperation

This paper describes a number of approaches to the development of more intelligent and more adaptable software. The paper introduces the notion of reeection and surveys two major styles: task and programming reeection. The paper then introduces a new form, viz operational reeection, based on the integration of these styles. This form of reeection is applied to cooperative environments and enables local database systems to be surrounded by a layer of metalevel software. This is used to capture domain and operational knowledge, and to describe, at least in part, remote systems and to monitor task-oriented activities. Thus we can turn a set of discrete database systems into a cooperative environment.