THE DESCRIPTION AND RETRIEVAL OF DIAGRAMS BASED ON CASE GRAMMAR

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Kawabata, Ryo | Kasahara, Toshiharu | Itoh, Kiyoshi

Affiliations: Department of Information and Communication Sciences, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan

Abstract: This paper describes methods of description and retrieval of diagrams based on case grammar that describes relations between verb and the other components. In systems analysis, analysts describe diagrams of a target system by using similar diagrams of the other systems. It is effective for analyzing systems to reuse the diagrams but it requires many experiences. The authors apply the case grammar to accumulate and retrieve diagrams in systems analysis. The terms described in diagrams are different depending on the domain, but the combination of two or more cases in diagrams of generic tasks such as trading task, monitoring task, etc. are semantically identical in different domain. For example, two activities "Guest makes a reservation for a room in hotel domain." and "Passenger makes a reservation for airplane in ticket domain." are identified as same kinds of task. Accumulating these synonymous combinations enables analysts to retrieve and to reuse diagrams across several domains. In the same domain, diagrams can be reused by replacing terms for the target system. In different domains, analysts can retrieve similar diagrams from the viewpoints of generic task and modify them. The authors propose a method to accumulate and retrieve diagrams based on case grammar. In our method, components in the diagram are accumulated with eight cases and conditional clause.

Keywords: diagram reuse, domain model, case grammar

Journal: Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 43-52, 2008