Editorial

I am so pleased that we are again fortunate to have another contribution from our Guest Columnist Dave Thomas. His interesting and provocative work over the years has contributed so significantly to the state of our art and more recently to our publication.

Columnist Anthony Simons’ fifth column (no counter revolution here) dealing with object-oriented type theory, aimed specifically at non-theoreticians is present in this issue. The series has been investigating the notion of simple object types and sub-typing from the syntactic point of view. This installment will help you sharpen your algebra. Columnist Won Kim is joined in this issue by Seung-Soo Park in their column explaining knowledge management. In his column “The Role of Roles”, James Odell, joined by H. Van Dyke Parunak, and Mitchell Fleischer, focuses on roles (“…a class that defines a normative behavioral repertoire of an agent…”) in the context of agent-based systems. Columnist Donald Firesmith examines in great detail engineering security requirements in his column of that same name. Columnist Mahesh Dodani focuses his column on the challenges of skill building in the OO arena. Our book review columnist, Charles Ashbacher has contributed three separate book reviews in addition to his annual “Best Books” piece.

Object modeling seems to be the dominant theme among the three feature-length papers in this issue (“How you could use NEPTUNE technology in the modelling process”, “An Object-Oriented Framework for Building Software Agents” and “Sending Messages in UML”).

I am preparing the second in a series of columns from the “Educator’s Corner” that shall be published in our next issue.

I look forward to hearing from you.