Towards an epistemology for software representations

The KBSE community is actively engaged in finding ways to represent software and the activities that relate to various stages in its lifecycle. While the wealth of modeling activities have, necessarily, been founded on first order logic based representations, the paper reports on research into software information systems that has found the domain of software knowledge to be inherently second order. A facility for accurately representing second order constructs such as are found in the software domain is also presented.