We present concepts for the implementation of hierarchical graphs, which can be used as basis for the implementation of tools for graphical formal description techniques (gFDT) like SDL or statecharts. Our approach provides a strong modularity of a speciication by a loose coupling between diierent hierarchy levels and it serves for a rapid development of interactive editors for gFDTs by a speci...

An important goal in the area of reliable software is to show that a program actually meets its speciications. This can be done using program veriication techniques. Assertions are made about the expected behavior of a program, and intermediate program states are examined to ensure that the speciications of the program are never violated. However, proving that the intermediate program steps lea...

We describe Valigator, a software tool for imperative program verification that efficiently combines symbolic computation and automated reasoning in a uniform framework. The system offers support for automatically generating and proving verification conditions and, most importantly, for automatically inferring loop invariants and bound assertions by means of symbolic summation, Gröbner basis co...

String players spend a significant amount of practice time creating and learning bowings. These may be indicated in the music using up-bow and down-bow symbols, but those traditional notations do not capture the complex bowing patterns that are latent within the music. Regular expressions, a mathematical notation for a simple class of formal languages, can describe precisely the bowing patterns...

We discuss the use of logic for natural language (NL) processing, both as an internal query language and as a programming tool. Some extensions of standard predicate calculus are motivated by the first of these roles. A logical system including these extensions is informally described. It incorporates semantic as well as syntactic NL features, and its semantics in a given interpretation (or dat...

We briefly describe the Hypertopic model created by Tech-CICO lab and the Agoræ software tool based on this model. We focus on how this allpurpose Knowledge Management approach, that we have called “socio semantic Web”, can help communities to formulate, to publish, or to broadcast knowledge, especially scientific knowledge in the field of Human and Social Sciences, where formal “ontology” appr...

The ambition of every designer is the software equivalent of a cathedral. But maintenance programmers are more comfortable in a farmhouse than a cathedral. We argue that current design methodologies are oriented towards cathedrals, and we propose object oriented design techniques and tools that are suitable for farmhouses. During the lifetime of a useful program, its users’ requirements change ...

The development of specifications often is a combination of smaller sub-components. Focusing on reuse, an interesting perspective is to formally define the combination of sub-components through refinement steps, reusing their properties and generating larger systems. The previous situation suggests the application of a reuse mechanism: composition. Event-B is a formal method that allows modelli...

Software tools for engineering tasks typically aim at welldefined aspects of an overall project, for which they employ domain-specific models. Managing information on assets is an important cross-sectional task, which makes the exchange of information valuable to many domains. In order to enable software tools to exchange information, the underlying meta-model needs to be open and common. This ...

Multiagent organizations provide a powerful way for developing multiagent systems. This paper presents a methodology for designing organizations based on formal specification of requirements for organizational behavior and requirements refinement related to organizational structure. The approach allows parts of the organization to be designed in parallel and later be put together to satisfy the...