The Formalization of CAME Architecture

Abstract

An informal description of a CAME framework based on the service object concept is presented in Chapter 3. Now the focus will be on the representational formalism of a CAME environment that can be used to implement a CAME environment to provide flexible modeling support for information systems design activities. A conceptual framework for a CAME environment using building blocks specification or a meta-meta model will be the main concentration in this chapter. The modeling techniques that are used to design information architectures of modeling techniques are popularly known as meta modeling techniques. To formalize the informal architectural building blocks of a CAME environment given in Chapter 3, one needs a uniform meta modeling technique capable of specifying the CAME service object primitives. Many examples of such techniques can be found in the literature; therefore, first the arguments for using PSM, task structure and LISA-D (Hofstede, 1993) base modeling technique as the meta modeling technique are stated. The architectural building blocks of the meta-meta model, which represent the service object based theory for CAME environments that can be used to provide a flexible modeling support for information systems design activities are presented in the remainder of the chapter. In this meta meta model the transaction service is not formally specified in order to keep the presentation limited to the method engineering needs. A formal and descriptive specifications of all these basic CAME services are available in Dahanayake (1997). The notational convention of PSM modeling technique is given in Appendix A.