Using Maude to write and execute ODP information viewpoint specifications

The aim of the open distributed processing (ODP) information viewpoint is to describe the semantics of the information and of the information processing in a system, from a global point of view, without having to worry about other considerations, such as how the information will be finally distributed or implemented or the technology used to achieve such implementation. Although several notations have been proposed to model this ODP viewpoint, they are not expressive enough to faithfully represent all the information concepts, or they tend to suffer from a lack of (formal) support, or both. In this paper, we explore the use of Maude as a formal notation for writing ODP information specifications. Maude is an executable rewriting logic language especially well suited for the specification of object-oriented open and distributed systems. We show how Maude offers a simple, natural, and accurate way of modeling the ODP information viewpoint concepts, allows the execution of the specifications produced, and offers good tool support for reasoning about them. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.