Model-driven tools use model queries for many purposes, including validation of well-formedness rules, speci cation of derived features, and directing rule-based model transformation. Query languages such as graph patterns may facilitate capturing complex structural relationships between model elements. Specifying such queries, however, may prove di cult for engineers familiar with the concrete...

The attribute "well-formed" is used homonymously in two different approaches to the study of musical tone relations. The present article explores commonalities and differences of the underlying theoretical ideas. Fred Lerdahl (2001) uses the attribute “wellformed” (in extension of the GTTM tradition) in order to formulate constraints for the constitution of the basic space as a context-sensitiv...

A metamodel expresses the syntactic well-formedness constraints that all models written using the notation of a modelling language must obey. We formally capture the metamodel for an industrial-strength object-oriented modelling language, BON, using the PVS specification language. We discuss how the PVS system helped in debugging the metamodel, and show how to use the PVS theorem prover for con...

The expression of contracts in computer readable form, and the development of automated tests for completeness and well-formedness of contracts, has opened the door to significant advances in automating contract negotiations. To meet the needs of automation, such negotiations must follow explicitly specified message-exchange protocols. But to meet the needs of the negotiating parties, these pro...

Datatype specialization is a form of subtyping that captures program invariants on data structures that are expressed using the convenient and intuitive datatype notation. Of particular interest are structural invariants such as well-formedness. We investigate the use of phantom types for describing datatype specializations. We show that it is possible to express statically-checked specializati...

syntax The concepts from which models are created (see Requirement 1) Class diagram at level M2 Concrete syntax Concrete rendering of these concepts (see Requirement 2) UML notation, informally specified Well-formedness Rules for applying the concepts (see Requirement 1) Constraints on the abstract Syntax (using the Object Constraint Language, for example) Semantics Description of a model’s mea...

One of the first steps in a software engineering process is the elaboration of the conceptual domain model. In this paper, we investigate how Formal Concept Analysis can be used to formally underpin the construction of a conceptual domain model. In particular, we demonstrate that intuitive verification rules for process-data matrices can be formally grounded in FCA theory. As a case study, we s...

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) is based on firstorder logic and set theory. As the most well-known application, OCL is used to formulate well-formedness rules in the UML metamodel. Here, the transitive closure of a relationship is defined in terms of an OCL invariant, which seems to contradict classical results on the expressive power of first-order logic. In this paper, we give sufficien...

This document describes part of an effort to achieve in Nuprl a practical reflection of its expression syntax. This reflection is done at the granularity of the operators; in particular, each operator of the syntax is denoted by another operator of the same syntax. Further, the syntax has binding operators, and we organize reflection not around the concrete binding syntax, but instead, around t...

Brand and Zaaropulo BZ83] introduced the model of communicating nite-state machines to represent a distributed system connected with FIFO channels. Several diierent communication protocols can be speciied with this simple model. In this paper we address the problem of automatically validating protocols by verifying properties such as well-formedness and absence of deadlock. Our method is based ...