ISF: A Visual Formalism for Specifying Interconnection Styles for Software Design

We have developed a framework for specifying high-level software designs. The core of the framework is a very simple visual notation. This notation enables designers to document designs as labelled rectangles and directed edges. In addition to the notation, our framework features a supporting formalism, called ISF (Interconnection Style Formalism). This formalism enables designers to customize the simple design notation by specifying the type of entities, relations, legal con gurations of entities and relations, as well as scoping rules of the custom notation. In this paper we present the formal de nition of ISF and use ISF to specify two custom design notations. We also describe how ISF speci cations, using deductive database technology, are used to generate supporting tools for these custom notations.