RSS v2.0: Spamming, User Experience and Formalization

RSS, once the most popular publish/subscribe system is believed to have come to an end due to reasons unexplored yet. The aim of this thesis is to examine one such reason, spamming. The context of this thesis is limited to spamming related to RSS v2.0. The study discusses RSS as a publish/subscribe system and investigates the possible reasons for the decline in the use of such a system and possible solutions to address RSS spamming. The thesis introduces RSS (being dependent on feed readers) and tries to find its relationship with spamming. In addition, the thesis tries to investigate possible socio-technical influences on spamming in RSS. The author presents the idea of applying formalization (formal specification technique) to open standards, RSSv2.0 in particular. Formal specifications are more concise, consistent, unambiguous and highly reusable in many cases. The merging of formal specification methods and open standards allows for i) a more concrete standard design, ii) an improved understanding of the environment under design, iii) an enforced certain level of precision into the specification, and also iv) provides software engineers with extended property checking/verification capabilities. The author supports and proposes the use of formalization in RSS. Based on the inferences gathered from the user experiment conducted during the course of this study, an analysis on the downfall of RSS is presented. However, the user experiment opens up different directions for future work in the evolution of RSS v3.0 which could be supported by formalization. The thesis concludes that RSS is on the verge of death/discontinuation due to the adverse effects of spamming and lack of its development which is evident from the limited amount of available research literature. RSS Feeds is a perfect example of what happens to a software if it fails to evolve itself with time

Automatic generation of the cases derived from algebraic specifications

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Component-based Algebraic Specification and Verification in CafeOBJ

. We present a formal method for component-based system specification and verification which is based on the new algebraic specification language CafeOBJ, which is a modern successor of OBJ incorporating several new developments in algebraic specification theory and practice. We first give an overview of the main features of CafeOBJ, including its logical foundations, and then we focus on the behavioural specification paradigm in CafeOBJ, surveying the object-oriented CafeOBJ specification and verification methodology based on behavioural abstraction. The last part of this paper further focuses on a component-based behavioural specification and verification methodology which features high reusability of both specification code and verification proof scores. This methodology constitutes the basis for an industrial strength formal method around CafeOBJ. 1 Introduction CafeOBJ (whose definition is given by [7])is a modern successor of the OBJ language incorporating several ne..