Formal justification in object-oriented modelling: A linguistic approach

When software engineers set out to build a system, they usually have the in formal idea that there is a relation between the linguistic world and the c onceptual world. In this paper, we present a formalisation of this empirica l relation, defining an intermediate mapping of the components of the lingu istic and conceptual worlds to their mathematical representations. This pro cess outputs a justified correspondence between natural language, used as a means of communication between users and software engineers, and conceptua l models, employed by software engineers as a first step towards building a system. In other words, our aim is to show how the equivalence of the ling uistic and conceptual representations of a requirement can be established i n a formal and justified manner. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V, All rights reserved.