Directions in Architectural Specifications

A. Expressive. Only naturally, coherent specifications must be based on an appropriate set of underlying abstractions [2]. The commonly accepted ontology (originally set forth in [1] and later developed in [3]) primarily consists of components, which are loci of data and computations, and connectors, which are means for transferring data and control between components. In the case of object-oriented architectures [4], one observes different abstractions, such as uniform sets of (possibly) high orders, clans (a set of dynamically-related methods), and class hierarchies.