Design principles of an office specification language

ABSTRACT

Office automation, interpreted most generally, is the utilization of technology to improve the productivity and quality of office work. This concept encompasses a wide range of devices, technologies, tools, and systems. One of its most powerful instances is the notion of an automated office information system. This is a software-intensive, computer-based system that seeks to support (and where appropriate, to automate) an entire office procedure, rather than simply to improve the performance of individual office tasks. However, there is a major impediment to the realization of such systems: because of their application-oriented and office-specific character, they are extremely costly to construct. One of the major reasons for this cost is that office systems analysts lack any tools or methodologies to employ in the process of determining and expressing the requirements of an automated office system. An office specification language is used to describe in a natural yet precise fashion the operation of an office system; its use can improve the process of constructing the system in a number of ways. In this paper, we set forth an approach to the design of office specification languages and present an overview of the major concepts in OSL, one such language that we are developing.

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