Abstract State Machines 1988-1998: Commented ASM Bibliography

An annotated bibliography of papers which deal with or use Abstract State Machines (ASMs), as of January 1998.Comment: Also maintained as a BibTeX file at http://www.eecs.umich.edu/gasm

An interval logic for higher-level temporal reasoning

Prior work explored temporal logics, based on classical modal logics, as a framework for specifying and reasoning about concurrent programs, distributed systems, and communications protocols, and reported on efforts using temporal reasoning primitives to express very high level abstract requirements that a program or system is to satisfy. Based on experience with those primitives, this report describes an Interval Logic that is more suitable for expressing such higher level temporal properties. The report provides a formal semantics for the Interval Logic, and several examples of its use. A description of decision procedures for the logic is also included

Design and foundations of ontologies with meta-modelling.

Ontologies are broadly used and proved modelling artifacts to conceptualize a domain. In particular the W3C standard ontology language OWL, based on description logics, allows the ontology engineer to formally represent a domain as a set of assertions about concepts, individuals and roles. Nowadays, complex applications leads to combine autonomously built ontologies into ontology networks by relating them through di erent kind of relations. Some relations, such as the mapping of two concepts from di erent ontologies, can be expressed by the standard ontology language OWL, i.e. by the description logics behind it. However, there are other kind of relations that are not soundly represented by OWL, such as the meta-modelling relation. The meta-modelling relation has to do with the modelling of the same real object with di erent abstraction levels, e.g. as a concept in one ontology and as an individual in another ontology. Even though there are a set of approaches that extend description logics to deal with meta-modelling, they do not solve relevant requirements of some real scenarios. The present thesis work introduces an extension to the description logic SHIQ which provides a exible syntax and a strong semantics, and moreover ensures the well-foundedness of the interpretation domain. This approach is di erent from existing meta-modelling approaches either in the syntax or in the semantics (or both), and moreover ensures the well-foundedness of the domain which is an original contribution from the theoretical point of view. The meta-modelling extension of SHIQ introduced in the present work is justi ed by a detailed description of a set of real case studies, with an analysis of the bene ts of the new approach to solve some relevant requirements. Finally, the present work addresses the methodological issue by introducing a design pattern to help the ontology engineer in the use of the proposed meta-modelling approach

Deciding regular grammar logics with converse through first-order logic

We provide a simple translation of the satisfiability problem for regular grammar logics with converse into GF2, which is the intersection of the guarded fragment and the 2-variable fragment of first-order logic. This translation is theoretically interesting because it translates modal logics with certain frame conditions into first-order logic, without explicitly expressing the frame conditions. A consequence of the translation is that the general satisfiability problem for regular grammar logics with converse is in EXPTIME. This extends a previous result of the first author for grammar logics without converse. Using the same method, we show how some other modal logics can be naturally translated into GF2, including nominal tense logics and intuitionistic logic. In our view, the results in this paper show that the natural first-order fragment corresponding to regular grammar logics is simply GF2 without extra machinery such as fixed point-operators.Comment: 34 page

Agent-based semantic composition of Web services using distributed description logics

International audienceAn important research challenge consists in composing web services in an automatic and distributed manner on a large scale. Indeed, most queries can not be satisfiable by one service and must be processed by composing several services. Each web service is often written by different designers and is described using the terms of their own ontology. Therefore, the composition process needs to deal with a variety of heterogeneous ontologies. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose an approach using Distributed Description Logics (DDL) to achieve the semantic composition of web services. DDL allows one to make semantic connections between ontologies and thus web services, as well as to reason to get a semantic composition of web services