Editorial



Richard Wiener,
Editor-in-Chief



Dear readers,

Happy holidays to our readers around the world!

As we begin the 2003 publication year and publish the fifth regular issue of JOT I would like to solicit comments from our readers regarding this journal. We have done our best to provide our readers with timely columns and papers that reflect some of the best and interesting work in the field of object technology. Your written feedback can help guide us to continue doing what
we have been doing or make changes. With our queue of accepted papers still relatively small, authors whose manuscripts are accepted for publication can continue to look forward to relatively short delays between acceptance and publication. Authors with ideas related to a Guest Column (or two) are always welcome to contact me (rswiener@acm.org).

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.


Kind regards,

Richard Wiener
Editor-in-Chief

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