Identifying Classes via Cognitive Approach in Object-Oriented System

One major problem in applying object-oriented (OO) methodologies is the difficulty of identifying classes for a system. Many tried to use fuzzy set theory to model the objected-oriented system and many proposed linguistic method to do the object analysis. However, little work has been done to identify the classes in OO systematically. After carefully analyzing the cognitive procedure of human being, this paper proposes a two-step identification method: First, tracing the source (the entities in a real world) of a given system. Second, identifying classes via viewpoints based on the source. The method could help people find the intrinsic information and extrinsic concepts epistemologically and employs an informal procedure to get the classes of an OO system easily.