Systems, methods and apparatus for generation and verification of policies in autonomic computing systems

Described herein is a method that produces fully (mathematically) tractable development of policies for autonomic systems from requirements through to code generation. This method is illustrated through an example showing how user formulated policies can be translated into a formal mode which can then be converted to code. The requirements-based programming method described provides faster, higher quality development and maintenance of autonomic systems based on user formulation of policies.Further, the systems, methods and apparatus described herein provide a way of analyzing policies for autonomic systems and facilities the generation of provably correct implementations automatically, which in turn provides reduced development time, reduced testing requirements, guarantees of correctness of the implementation with respect to the policies specified at the outset, and provides a higher degree of confidence that the policies are both complete and reasonable. The ability to specify the policy for the management of a system and then automatically generate an equivalent implementation greatly improves the quality of software, the survivability of future missions, in particular when the system will operate untended in very remote environments, and greatly reduces development lead times and costs

Generating natural language descriptions of Z test cases

Critical software most often requires an independent validation and verification (IVV). IVV is usually performed by domain experts, who are not familiar with specific, many times formal, development technologies. In addition, model-based testing (MBT) is a promising testing technique for the verification of critical software. Test cases generated by MBT tools are logical descriptions. The problem is, then, to provide natural language (NL) descriptions of these test cases, making them accessible to domain experts. In this paper, we present ongoing research aimed at finding a suitable method for generating NL descriptions from test cases in a formal specification language. A first prototype has been developed and applied to a real-world project in the aerospace sector

Second CLIPS Conference Proceedings, volume 1

Topics covered at the 2nd CLIPS Conference held at the Johnson Space Center, September 23-25, 1991 are given. Topics include rule groupings, fault detection using expert systems, decision making using expert systems, knowledge representation, computer aided design and debugging expert systems

Automated re-typesetting, indexing and content enhancement for scanned marriage registers

For much of England and Wales marriage registers began to be kept in 1537. The marriage details were recorded locally, and in longhand, until 1st July 1837, when central records began. All registers were kept in the local parish church. In the period from 1896 to 1922 an attempt was made, by the Phillimore company of London, using volunteer help, to transcribe marriage registers for as many English parishes as possible and to have them printed. This paper describes an experiment in the automated retypesetting of Volume 2 of the 15-volume Phillimore series relating to the county of Derbyshire. The source material was plain text derived from running Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on a set of page scans taken from the original printed volume. The aim of the experiment was to avoid any idea of labour-intensive page-by-page rebuilding with tools such as Acrobat Capture. Instead, it proved possible to capitalise on the regular, tabular, structure of the Register pages as a means of automating the re-typesetting process, using UNIX troff software and its tbl preprocessor. A series of simple software tools helped to bring about the OCR-to-troff transformation. However, the re-typesetting of the text was not just an end in itself but, additionally, a step on the way to content enhancement and content repurposing. This included the indexing of the marriage entries and their potential transformation into XML and GEDCOM notations. The experiment has shown, for highly regular material, that the efforts of one programmer, with suitable low-level tools, can be far more effective than attempting to recreate the printed material using WYSIWYG software

Automated re-typesetting, indexing and content enhancement for scanned marriage registers

For much of England and Wales marriage registers began to be kept in 1537. The marriage details were recorded locally, and in longhand, until 1st July 1837, when central records began. All registers were kept in the local parish church. In the period from 1896 to 1922 an attempt was made, by the Phillimore company of London, using volunteer help, to transcribe marriage registers for as many English parishes as possible and to have them printed. This paper describes an experiment in the automated retypesetting of Volume 2 of the 15-volume Phillimore series relating to the county of Derbyshire. The source material was plain text derived from running Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on a set of page scans taken from the original printed volume. The aim of the experiment was to avoid any idea of labour-intensive page-by-page rebuilding with tools such as Acrobat Capture. Instead, it proved possible to capitalise on the regular, tabular, structure of the Register pages as a means of automating the re-typesetting process, using UNIX troff software and its tbl preprocessor. A series of simple software tools helped to bring about the OCR-to-troff transformation. However, the re-typesetting of the text was not just an end in itself but, additionally, a step on the way to content enhancement and content repurposing. This included the indexing of the marriage entries and their potential transformation into XML and GEDCOM notations. The experiment has shown, for highly regular material, that the efforts of one programmer, with suitable low-level tools, can be far more effective than attempting to recreate the printed material using WYSIWYG software

Reconstituting typeset Marriage Registers using simple software tools

In a world of fully integrated software applications, which can seem daunting to develop and to maintain, it is sometimes useful to recall that a system of loosely-linked software components can provide surprisingly powerful and flexible methods for software development. This paper describes a project which aims to retypeset a series of volumes from the Phillimore Marriage Registers, first published in England around the turn of the last century. The source material is plain text derived from running Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on a set of page scans taken from the original printed volumes. The regular, tabular, structure of the Register pages allows us to automate the re-typesetting process. The UNIX troff software and its tbl preprocessor are used for the typesetting itself, but a series of simple awk-based software tools, all of them parsers and code generators of one sort or another, is used to bring about the OCR-to-troff transformation. By re-parsing the generated troff codes it is possible to produce a surname index as a supplement to the retypeset volume. Moreover, this second-stage parsing has been invaluable in discovering subtle ‘typos’ in the automatically generated material. With small adjustments to this parser it would be possible to output the complete marriage entries in standard XML or GEDCOM notations