On the Notion of Semantic Metric Spaces for Object and Aspect Oriented Software Design

Quality assurance via metrics and quality models in conceptual modelling and design for software and data or knowledge bases has always been of a major concern for software, systems and database developers. Given the inherent difficulty of suggesting as objective as possible design metrics, this paper discusses a theoretical framework for software design metrics, which conceives parameters as dimensions of a metric space. To this extent, it provides a bridge between techniques for similarity measurement in the field of information retrieval and software design. The introduced metric space is conceived as a vector space, which enables comparisons among proposed software development alternatives. This is illustrated in terms of metric parameters for aspect-oriented software system design and its impact on the object-oriented counterpart. However, the theoretical framework and discussion could also be considered as a design quality metrics framework for alternative conceptualizations as applied to object-oriented software design and its persistent storage counterpart via object-oriented databases.