Domain-specific approaches to software engineering require the automation and evolution of domain knowledge. As automatic, domain-specific design synthesis techniques improve, emphasis will shift to automatic generation of domain-specific development environments themselves. These environments will need to be generated from domain expert-evolvable representations of knowledge. The discipline of Knowledge Acquisition has produced tools to automatically generate domain-specific expert systems from domain expert-evolvable representations of knowledge. Thus Software Engineering's emerging era of domain-specificity calls for many of the same capabilities that spurred the discipline of Knowledge Acquisition. The discipline of Algebraic Specification has produced correctness-preserving specification structuring mechanisms to build large specifications in a methodical and understandable way. In an effort to discover a framework to define tools to support Software Engineering's new era, we apply algebraic specification structuring mechanisms to evaluate several exemplary knowledge acquisition tools. Algebraic specification structuring mechanisms provide an architectural metalanguage into which knowledge acquisition tools are recast. This highlights how knowledge acquisition tools support domain theory structure and evolution. This evaluation provide insights into requirements for tools to automatically generate effective, efficient, domain-specific development environments from domain expert-evolvable representations of knowledge.

With this paper we would like to introduce what we believe to be a unifying framework for the investigation of multilingual system representation phenomena. The framework applies the body of knowledge on algebraic specifications to the representation and manipulation of formal languages. In this framework, a formal language is represented by an algebraic specification; the language's syntax is represented by the algebraic specification's signature; and the language's semantics are represented by the algebraic specification's axioms. Strings in the language are represented by terms of the algebraic specification, or in the more general case by formulas of the algebraic specification or a definitional extension of the algebraic specification. Algebraic specification structuring operations, such as specification morphisms, parameterized specifications, and colimits are used to construct new languages from component languages.

We review a number of approaches to multilingual system representation that have been presented in the research literature. For each of these approaches, we show how the approach can be represented in our framework.