This rather lengthy paper is concerned with the conceptual aspects of office system design. It aims to provide the functional requirements from which the office prototype will be developed and the final architectural design will be chosen. TODOS is a proposed integrated environment for office design that includes tools for requirements analysis, conceptual design, rapid prototyping, and architecture design. C-TODOS is the conceptual design tool within TODOS. Its aim is to obtain functional specifications. C-TODOS is centered on the interaction of the designer with a specification database that stores the functional description of the target office information system. This paper emphasizes automatic support for office information systems conceptual design.

The authors present a substantive review of previous work and current trends in this field. They then describe the overall TODOS development environment for designing office information systems. Next, they discuss the specification language associated with this approach, which allows a formal definition of office information systems schemas. The remainder of the paper describes various details of C-TODOS.

C-TODOS consists of a specification database, an insertion model, a query model, a consistency checking model, and associated libraries for inserting or deleting elements of the database, consistency checking, schema validation, and graphical interfacing. A formal query language on the contents of the database, TOD-QUEL, allows the internal examination of properties and characteristics of an office schema being designed. An appendix gives a detailed description of this language. The authors use TOD-QUEL in the paper to formally specify constraints and design support provided by C-TODOS.

The latter part of this paper illustrates how C-TODOS may be used for schema validation. The authors describe a case study of a bank loan office. They also discuss some considerations proceeding from the implementation of C-TODOS on a PC using a relational database.

This paper should interest workers on office information systems. Its value for more casual readers may be limited, however, since despite its length, many of its concepts are not explained or illustrated in sufficient detail.