SPECIFICATION OF SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE
Mark Gerken · International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering · 2000
Over the past several years, software architecture representation and analysis has become an active area of research. However, most approaches to software architecture representation and analysis have been informal. We postulate that through formality, the term "architecture" can be precisely defined and important properties of systems, such as semantic compatibility between connected entities, can be investigated with precision. In this paper, we use category theory and algebraic specifications to develop a formal definition of architecture and show how architecture theory can be used in the construction of software specifications.