A syntactic theory of software architecture
Thomas Roy Dean, James R. Cordy · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · 1995
Introduces a general, extensible diagrammatic syntax for expressing software architectures based on typed nodes and connections and formalized using set theory. The syntax provides a notion of abstraction corresponding to the concept of a subsystem, and exploits this notion in a general mechanism for pattern matching over architectures. We demonstrate these ideas using a small example architecture language with a limited number of types of nodes and connectors, and a small taxonomy of architectures characterized as sets of patterns in the language.>