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A retrospective on Telos as a metamodeling language for requirements engineering

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Abstract

Telos is a conceptual modeling language intended to capture software knowledge, such as software system requirements, domain knowledge, architectures, design decisions and more. To accomplish this, Telos was designed to be extensible in the sense that the concepts used to capture software knowledge can be defined in the language itself, instead of being built-in. This extensibility is accomplished through powerful metamodeling features, which proved very useful for interrelating heterogeneous models from requirements, model-driven software engineering, data integration, ontology engineering, cultural informatics and education. We trace the evolution of ideas and research results in the Telos project from its origins in the late eighties. Our account looks at the semantics of Telos, its various implementations and its applications. We also recount related research by other groups and the cross-influences of ideas thereof. We conclude with lessons learnt.

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Notes

  1. Relational database researchers were the first to make this distinction by introducing the concepts of valid time and transaction time of a tuple in 1985 [120, 124]. Since this paper is on the evolution of the ideas of Telos, let us point out a fact regarding the evolution of these two time dimensions in the database community: It took 26 years for these concepts to be introduced into SQL as part of the standard SQL:2011. This has also accelerated the introduction of temporal features in commercial DBMS.

  2. http://conceptbase.sourceforge.net/.

  3. Sadly enough, in reality, this constraint doesn’t always hold.

  4. http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/tgn/index.html.

  5. The original version of Telos presented in Sect. 3 has three more \(\omega\)-classes: IndividualClass, AttributeClass and OmegaClass.

  6. ConceptBase supports the belief time of an object, i.e., the time when the object was first created and when it was marked as deleted, if applicable.

  7. http://network.icom.museum/cidoc/.

  8. http://network.icom.museum/cidoc/working-groups/crm-special-interest-group/.

  9. http://www.cidoc-crm.org/.

  10. http://www.cidoc-crm.org/collaborations.

  11. http://flora.sourceforge.net/.

  12. http://coherentknowledge.com/.

  13. The W3C document https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-rdf-syntax-971002/ introduced RDF to the research community. RDF became a W3C Recommendation two years later; its most recent version is RDF 1.1.

  14. O-Telos is the Telos dialect implemented in ConceptBase.

  15. http://strabon.di.uoa.gr/.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all of our colleagues who contributed to the design, implementation and applications of Telos from 1986 onward.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens University Campus, 15784, Ilisia, Athens, Greece

    Manolis Koubarakis

  2. Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, 08855, USA

    Alexander Borgida

  3. Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economic and Business, 76 Patission Street, 10434, Athens, Greece

    Panos Constantopoulos

  4. Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas, Nikolaou Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton, 70013, Heraklion, Crete, Greece

    Martin Doerr & Dimitris Plexousakis

  5. RWTH Aachen, Lehrstuhl Informatik 5, Ahornstr. 55, 52056, Aachen, Germany

    Matthias Jarke

  6. School of Informatics (IIT), University of Skövde, Box 408, 54128, Skövde, Sweden

    Manfred A. Jeusfeld

  7. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), University of Ottawa, 800 King Edward Ave., Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5, Canada

    John Mylopoulos

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  1. Manolis Koubarakis
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Koubarakis, M., Borgida, A., Constantopoulos, P. et al. A retrospective on Telos as a metamodeling language for requirements engineering. Requirements Eng 26, 1–23 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-020-00329-x

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