Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

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.