Building information system requirements using generic structures

The author presents generic knowledge to speed up the construction of information system requirements and, more importantly, the behavioral part of entities. The solution is based on the hypothesis that generic structures independent of a particular application can be associated to classes of real-world phenomena. These structures can be reused in the development of different projects. The hypothesis is that there exists classes of similar real-world phenomena which are described using identical structures. A generic structure describes either the static and behavioral properties of a class of phenomena. Designing an application can be seen as the recognition of these phenomena and the instantiation of the associated generic structures. The formalism used to express the generic knowledge is presented, namely the triple <situation, decision, action>. A presentation of generic knowledge with examples is given. The use of such knowledge is illustrated through an example