Translating descriptions of a viewpoint among different representations

An important part of the systems development process is building models of real-world phenomena. These phenomena are described by many different kinds of information, and this diversity has resulted in a wide variety of modelling representations. Different types of information are better expressed by some representations than others, so it is sensible to use multiple representations to describe a phenomenon. This paper describes an approach to facilitating the use of multiple representations within a single viewpoint by translating descriptions of the viewpoint among different representations. An important issue with such translations is their quality, or how well they map the constructs of one representation to the constructs of another. Two methods are proposed for improving translation quality: heuristics and enrichment, and a preliminary metric for measuring relative translation quality is described.