Formal justification in object-oriented modelling: A linguistic approach

When software engineers set out to build a system, they usually have the informal idea that there is a relation between the linguistic world and the conceptual world. In this paper, we present a formalisation of this empirical relation, defining an intermediate mapping of the components of the linguistic and conceptual worlds to their mathematical representations. This process outputs a justified correspondence between natural language, used as a means of communication between users and software engineers, and conceptual models, employed by software engineers as a first step towards building a system. In other words, our aim is to show how the equivalence of the linguistic and conceptual representations of a requirement can be established in a formal and justified manner.