Object Oriented Discourse

[Kenneth Fields]

The problem domain is professional/academic discourse
communities. I am writing an interface for discourse
browsing. This is the domain analysis phase. The goal is
to browse live discourse, if not found you can create
and maintain one - if your discourse becomes inactive
it is automatically garbage collected. First, what
is this area of linguistics called.

If anyone is familiar with OO analysis or from another
angle prototype theory, maybe they will discuss the question
of discourse classes, their attributes, behaviors,
responsibilites, and encapsulated knowledges.

For example: with Discourse the superClass, lingistics is
an instantiation of Discourse. Linguistics is really an
abstract class, because any concrete discourse actually
involves some subclassification of linguistics such as
ethno-, anthro- or socio-. On the other hand, this really
doesn't describe the real-life objects in the field of
linguistics: people, listservs, conferences, associations,
libraries, journals. I need your help :), Especially from the
meta-language perspective of modeling. Is anyone familiar
with UML (unified modeling language).

Yours interdisciplinarily,

Kenneth Fields
Ph.D. Media Arts and Technology
Institute of Human Computer Interaction and Media Integration
Department of Computer Science
Tsinghua University
Beijing, China 100084
ken at tsinghua.edu.cn
ken at create.ucsb.edu
http://media.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/~ken
(86 10) 8316 1363