Dynamic semantics negotiation in distributed and evolving CORBA systems: towards semantic-directed system configuration

Modern distributed software systems are designed often in such a way that they accommodate change by adding or removing components during run-time. This implies that the architecture of the distributed system has to accommodate such additions and removals after design time. We argue that semantic information about the components has to be available in order to achieve always a functioning system in the presence of such change actions. Thus it is the aim to go beyond the currently available plug-in architectures where the semantics of the public interfaces is often only implicit. In order to achieve such a semantics-directed configuration we discuss a graph based approach for representing and matching semantic descriptions of software components. Based on such an approach (sub-)structures of the architecture can be designed that the components organize themselves on the basis of their semantic concepts.