A Crucial factor in the creation of adaptable systems dealing with changing requirements is the suitability of the underlying technology in allowing the evolution of the system.A reflective system utilizes an open architecture where implicit system aspects are reified to become explicit first-class(meta-data)objects.These implicit system aspects are often fundamental structures which are inaccessible and immutable,and theri reification as meta-data objects can serve as the basis for changes and extensions to the system, making it self-describing.To address the evolvability issue,this paper proposes a reflective architecture based on two orthogonal abstractions-model abstraction and information abstraction.In this architecture the modeling abstractions allow for the separation of the description meta-data from the system aspects they represent so that they can be managed and versioned independently,asynchronously and explicitly.
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