An Activity Language for the ADL Toolkit

Authors: David Garlan, Andrew Kompanek with John Kenney, David Luckham, Bradley Schmerl and Dave Wile.

Working draft published August 2000.

Summary

With an eye toward sharing event-based behavior in architectural descriptions, a number of researchers at ISI (Wile), CMU (Garlan & Kompanek) and Stanford (Luckham & Kenney) started a dialogue to converge on an event standard. The results are summarized in this working report. The main idea of the proposal is to adopt an Acme-like approach: a simple base-level event representation would capture the minimal, core aspects of events. Additionally, other more tool-specific information could be added to those event representations in the form of annotations. In this report we outline the proposed scheme. We begin by enumerating some of the requirements that we identified early in our discussions. Next we discuss the basic ontology of events, activities and their types. Then we introduce two proposals for concrete representation: one based on XML, the other on an Acme-like syntax. Finally, we illustrate how collections of events derived from existing ADLs can be mapped into the activity language.

For further information, please visit the home pages of the ABLE research project and Carnegie Mellon University's Composable Systems Group.