A framework for classifying and developing extensible architectural views

Despite its widespread use in the software architecture community, architectural views and relationships among them are poorly defined. A solid taxonomy of views is a critical factor in tackling this problem since it must adopt an unambiguous definition of views and provide rigorous criteria for classification. Nevertheless, the existing taxonomies of views fail to eliminate vagueness surrounding the definitions of views and their inter-relationships mainly due to their informal nature. One of the most significant consequences of these failures is inability to systematically define new views in support of domain-specialization. This paper is an attempt to resolve these outstanding problems by proposing a sound framework for creating new, customized taxonomies of views in a repeatable manner, based on the formal concept of refinement.