TROLL is a language particularly suited for the early stages of information system development, when the universe of discourse must be described. In TROLL the descriptions of the static and dynamic aspects of entities are integrated into object descriptions. Sublanguages for data terms, for first-order and temporal assertions, and for processes, are used to describe respectively the static properties, the behavior, and the evolution over time of objects. TROLL organizes system design through object-orientation and the support of abstractions such as classification, specialization, roles, and aggregation. Language features for state interactions and dependencies among components support the composition of the system from smaller modules, as does the facility of defining interfaces on top of object descriptions.

The focus of this paper is on the modeling of application and business process in Cooperative Information Systems. Such processes use several resources and services to achieve a common, global system goal. We integrate the proposed concepts into the framework of a formal object-oriented specification language (TROLL). The goals of our approach are to provide additional modeling support for business and application processes, to explain these processes in the underlying framework and to couple tightly the modeling of global processes and the modeling of structural aspects of the system.

We propose an object-oriented logical formalism to conceptionally model applications in an interoperable environment. Such an environment consists of heterogeneous and autonomous local (database) systems. Applications in such an environment use several resources and services. Their conceptual modelling involves re-specification of existing systems in terms of homogeneous views, modelling of behavior and system dynamics, modelling of logically distributed components in an open environment and the modelling of communication relationships and dependencies between components. We introduce a formal object-oriented language capable of dealing with these requirements and illustrate its use to model applications in an interoperable environment.