Translating descriptions of a viewpoint among different representations

Abstract

An important part of the systems development process is building models of real-world phenomena. These phenomena are described by many different kinds of information, and this diversity has resulted in a wide variety of modelling representations. Some types of information are better expressed by some representations than others, so it is sensible to use multiple representations to describe a real-world phenomenon. The author has developed an approach to facilitating the use of multiple representations within a single viewpoint by translating descriptions of the viewpoint among different representations. An important issue with such translations is their quality, or how well they map constructs of one representation to constructs of another representation. Two possible methods for improving translation quality, heuristics and enrichment, are proposed in this paper, and a preliminary metric for measuring relative translation quality is described.