Foundation of the taxonomic object system

Object-oriented methods are lacking semantically compatible concepts for structuring complex applications consisting of hundreds or even thousands of classes. This paper provides the foundation of a so-called taxonomic object system which provides a framework for object-oriented concepts. Based on this taxonomic object system new object-oriented concepts (package class, subsystem class, system class, enterprise class) are developed that allow large applications to be structured bottom-up as well as top-down. The developed new concepts are fully compatible with the fundamental ideas of the object-oriented paradigm (object identity, abstract data, inheritance). These concepts aid the structuring of large applications and are suitable for improving design documentation. The concepts are exemplified by modeling CORBA object services and CORBA common facilities. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.