archives

terminology for scope of discourse, i.e. CS-domain

I noticed a lack of good terminology to discuss mixed content intended for different uses -- or merely for alternate focus -- depending on 1) what sort of tool might work with it, or 2) what kind of activity or analysis is in scope. The idea I want means something like "asset class" but is also covered by "domain" in its general sense, except many people accept only one sense of a word upon first hearing. (Insert a comedy dialog here: a physicist mentions a magnetic domain in an iron object, only to be blind-sided by a troll who explains internet domains do not apply in that context.)

Typically people put different asset classes in different files, and say "this file's content is for that tool", but never talk about what they have in common besides that they are "files". Some tools might want to perform cross-domain analysis, or code generation. But it's hard to describe without enumerating "now we do X" and "now we do Y"; and the relation of X and Y is idiosyncratic and specific, rather than being generally alternate asset class domains.

The term "aspect" in aspect-oriented-computing is related, except no one will know what you mean if you use aspect as a synonym for domain. If you take content from different asset class domains, and mix them together in one file (with related things near each other for easier reference), with each one scoped suitably via syntax of some kind, there isn't a good word that denotes what is inside each scope. In one you have "stuff about X", and in another you have "stuff about Y", but stuff is pretty vague. You can put them in different logical files in an archive, but a problem of crummy terminology remains.

For example, suppose in one scope you have a bunch of code that "does task X", and in another scope you put a description of sequence diagrams that ought to result from that, so a tool can generate test code or perform analysis for verification. (A typical reason to do this might be that one asset is an emergent result of another asset class, and very hard to see unless explicitly described.) In a more general case, you might want to characterize what several sorts of program are doing in a larger system.

What I'm looking for is terminology about the semantics of expressing different things, perhaps in different languages, and making statements or queries about their relationships in space, time, or causal interactions. (The obvious response is "don't do that"; in a comedy dialog, one party can ask "why do you want to do that?" while pushing either focus on X or focus on Y, with no concern about how they relate -- it's someone else's problem.) Probably each domain has its own type system, but that doesn't seem very helpful here.