Architecture specification language: design and implementation

The report presents the design and the implementation of ASL, a Language for specifying Office Information System Architectures. An Office Information System Architecture is seen as a set of interconnected hardware components, running software packages that perform typical office activities. The Language presented adopts the object oriented representation paradigm, and organizes the specification of an Architecture through four level of abstractions. The knowledge on commercial hardware and software components that are employed in architectures is collected in the ASL Catalogue. ASL is implemented on top of PSN, an extension of Lisp with knowledge structuring facilities. Data structures and programs that handle architectures are then embodied in a PSN knowledge base and manipulated by the PSN interpreter. The interface provided with the Language uses windows, menus and Sunwindow text editing capabilities to facilitate the specification of ASL operations and the visualization of their results.