Engineering Domain-Specific Implicit Invocation Mechanisms

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Implicit invocation mechanisms are a fundamental technique for organizing software systems. Typically, each of these mechanisms has been produced - at significant cost - as an innovative design and implementation. One reason for this diversity is that each mechanism has been designed for different domains. Another reason, however, is that the common properties of implicit invocation mechanisms are poorly understood. Consequently, it is hard to take advantage of previous experiences when designing a new mechanism. Now, however, the collection of mechanisms and practical experience is rich enough to permit the characterization of the design space so that choices can be made in a principled and routine way. To achieve this ability to engineer implicit invocation mechanisms requires three steps. First, based on an analysis of the common and distinct aspects of existing mechanisms, the underlying architecture of such mechanisms will be formalized. Second, how to create new mechanisms with specific desirable properties by specializing this architecture according to well-defined principles will be determined. Third, this architecture and these principles will be applied to two domains: an environment for manipulating formal specifications and an environment for interactive manipulation of encyclopedia articles.