Generating collaborative systems for digital libraries: A model-driven approach

This is an open access article shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework

TURTLE-P: a UML profile for the formal validation of critical and distributed systems

The timed UML and RT-LOTOS environment, or TURTLE for short, extends UML class and activity diagrams with composition and temporal operators. TURTLE is a real-time UML profile with a formal semantics expressed in RT-LOTOS. Further, it is supported by a formal validation toolkit. This paper introduces TURTLE-P, an extended profile no longer restricted to the abstract modeling of distributed systems. Indeed, TURTLE-P addresses the concrete descriptions of communication architectures, including quality of service parameters (delay, jitter, etc.). This new profile enables co-design of hardware and software components with extended UML component and deployment diagrams. Properties of these diagrams can be evaluated and/or validated thanks to the formal semantics given in RT-LOTOS. The application of TURTLE-P is illustrated with a telecommunication satellite system

A Formal Framework for Modeling Trust and Reputation in Collective Adaptive Systems

Trust and reputation models for distributed, collaborative systems have been studied and applied in several domains, in order to stimulate cooperation while preventing selfish and malicious behaviors. Nonetheless, such models have received less attention in the process of specifying and analyzing formally the functionalities of the systems mentioned above. The objective of this paper is to define a process algebraic framework for the modeling of systems that use (i) trust and reputation to govern the interactions among nodes, and (ii) communication models characterized by a high level of adaptiveness and flexibility. Hence, we propose a formalism for verifying, through model checking techniques, the robustness of these systems with respect to the typical attacks conducted against webs of trust.Comment: In Proceedings FORECAST 2016, arXiv:1607.0200

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial