Using structured grammar domain models to capture software system essence

Creation of a precise domain vocabulary is crucial for capturing the essence of any software system, either when recovering knowledge from a legacy system or when formulating requirements for a new one. Software specifications usually maintain noun notions and include them in central vocabularies. Verb or adjective phrases are easily forgotten and their definitions buried inside imprecise paragraphs of text. This paper proposes a model-based language for comprehensive treatment of domain knowledge, expressed through constrained natural language phrases that are grouped by nouns and include verbs, adjectives and prepositions. In this language, vocabularies can be formulated to describe behavioural, declarative and conditional characteristics of a given problem domain. What is important, these characteristics can be used (linked) from within other specifications similarly to a wiki. In particular, the application logic can be formulated through sequences of imperative Subject-Predicate sentences containing only links to the phrases in the vocabulary. The paper presents initial tooling framework to capture application logic specifications and make them available for further automated transformations.