Process Creation and Full Sequential Composition in a Name-Passing Calculus

This paper presents the underlying theory for a process calculus featuring process creation and sequential composition, instead of the more usual parallel composition and action prefixing, in a setting where mobility is achieved by communicating channel names. We discuss the questions of scope and name binding, raised by the interaction of mobility and sequential composition. Substitution of names is integrated as a syntactic operator in the calculus. We present an axiomatic theory for the calculus and show its soundness and completeness w.r.t. bisimulation equivalence

DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field

On the Extensibility of Formal Methods Tools

Modern software systems often have long lifespans over which they must continually evolve to meet new, and sometimes unforeseen, requirements. One way to effectively deal with this is by developing the system as a series of extensions. As requirements change, the system evolves through the addition of new extensions and, potentially, the removal of existing extensions. In order for this kind of development process to thrive, it is necessary that the system have a high level of extensibility. Extensibility is the capability of a system to support the gradual addition of new, unplanned functionalities. This dissertation investigates extensibility of software systems and focuses on a particular class of software: formal methods tools. The approach is broad in scope. Extensibility of systems is addressed in terms of design, analysis and improvement, which are carried out in terms of source code and software architecture. For additional perspective, extensibility is also considered in the context of formal modelling. The work carried out in this dissertation led to the development of various extensions to the Overture tool supporting the Vienna Development Method, including a new proof obligation generator and integration with theorem provers. Additionally, the extensibility of Overture itself was also improved and it now better supports the development and integration of various kinds of extensions. Finally, extensibility techniques have been applied to formal modelling, leading to an extensible architectural style for formal models

Chemical information matters: an e-Research perspective on information and data sharing in the chemical sciences

Recently, a number of organisations have called for open access to scientific information and especially to the data obtained from publicly funded research, among which the Royal Society report and the European Commission press release are particularly notable. It has long been accepted that building research on the foundations laid by other scientists is both effective and efficient. Regrettably, some disciplines, chemistry being one, have been slow to recognise the value of sharing and have thus been reluctant to curate their data and information in preparation for exchanging it. The very significant increases in both the volume and the complexity of the datasets produced has encouraged the expansion of e-Research, and stimulated the development of methodologies for managing, organising, and analysing "big data". We review the evolution of cheminformatics, the amalgam of chemistry, computer science, and information technology, and assess the wider e-Science and e-Research perspective. Chemical information does matter, as do matters of communicating data and collaborating with data. For chemistry, unique identifiers, structure representations, and property descriptors are essential to the activities of sharing and exchange. Open science entails the sharing of more than mere facts: for example, the publication of negative outcomes can facilitate better understanding of which synthetic routes to choose, an aspiration of the Dial-a-Molecule Grand Challenge. The protagonists of open notebook science go even further and exchange their thoughts and plans. We consider the concepts of preservation, curation, provenance, discovery, and access in the context of the research lifecycle, and then focus on the role of metadata, particularly the ontologies on which the emerging chemical Semantic Web will depend. Among our conclusions, we present our choice of the "grand challenges" for the preservation and sharing of chemical information

Challenges and Directions in Formalizing the Semantics of Modeling Languages

Developing software from models is a growing practice and there exist many model-based tools (e.g., editors, interpreters, debuggers, and simulators) for supporting model-driven engineering. Even though these tools facilitate the automation of software engineering tasks and activities, such tools are typically engineered manually. However, many of these tools have a common semantic foundation centered around an underlying modeling language, which would make it possible to automate their development if the modeling language specification were formalized. Even though there has been much work in formalizing programming languages, with many successful tools constructed using such formalisms, there has been little work in formalizing modeling languages for the purpose of automation. This paper discusses possible semantics-based approaches for the formalization of modeling languages and describes how this formalism may be used to automate the construction of modeling tools

CML: Evolution and design.

A retrospective view of the design and evolution of Chemical Markup Language (CML) is presented by its original authors.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Gradual computerisation and verification of mathematics : MathLang's path into Mizar

There are many proof checking tools that allow capturing mathematical knowledge into formal representation. Those proof systems allow further automatic verifica- tion of the logical correctness of the captured knowledge. However, the process of encoding common mathematical documents in a chosen proof system is still labour- intensive and requires comprehensive knowledge of such system. This makes the use of proof checking tools inaccessible for ordinary mathematicians. This thesis provides a solution for the computerisation of mathematical documents via a num- ber of gradual steps using the MathLang framework. We express the full process of formalisation into the Mizar proof checker. The first levels of such gradual computerisation path have been developing well before the course of this PhD started. The whole project, called MathLang, dates back to 2000 when F. Kamareddine and J.B. Wells started expressing their ideas of novel approach for computerising mathematical texts. They mainly aimed at developing a mathematical framework which is flexible enough to connect existing, in many cases different, approaches of computerisation mathematics, which allows various degrees of formalisation (e.g., partial, full formalisation of chosen parts, or full formalisation of the entire doc- ument), which is compatible with different mathematical foundations (e.g., type theory, set theory, category theory, etc.) and proof systems (e.g., Mizar, Isar, Coq, HOL, Vampire). The first two steps in the gradual formalisation were developed by F. Kamareddine, J.B. Wells and M. Maarek with a small contribution of R. Lamar to the second step. In this thesis we develop the third level of the gradual path, which aims at capturing the rhetorical structure of mathematical documents. We have also integrated further steps of the gradual formalisation, whose final goal is the Mizar system. We present in this thesis a full path of computerisation and formalisation of math- ematical documents into the Mizar proof checker using the MathLang framework. The development of this method was driven by the experience of computerising a number of mathematical documents (covering different authoring styles)