A Theory-Based Representation for Object-Oriented Domain Models Accepted for publication IEEE Transations on Software Engineering

Formal software speci cation has long been touted as a way to increase the quality and reliability of software; however, it remains an intricate, manually intensive activity. An alternative to using formal speci cations directly is to translate graphically-based, semiformal speci cations into formal speci cations. However, before this translation can take place, a formal de nition of basic object oriented concepts must be found. This paper presents an algebraic model of object-orientation that de nes how object-oriented concepts can be represented algebraically using an object-oriented algebraic speci cation language O-Slang. O-Slang combines basic algebraic speci cation constructs with category theory operations to capture internal object class structure as well as relationships between classes.