Workshop on Database Programming Languages

These are the revised proceedings of the Workshop on Database Programming Languages held at Roscoff, Finistère, France in September of 1987. The last few years have seen an enormous activity in the development of new programming languages and new programming environments for databases. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together researchers from both databases and programming languages to discuss recent developments in the two areas in the hope of overcoming some of the obstacles that appear to prevent the construction of a uniform database programming environment. The workshop, which follows a previous workshop held in Appin, Scotland in 1985, was extremely successful. The organizers were delighted with both the quality and volume of the submissions for this meeting, and it was regrettable that more papers could not be accepted. Both the stimulating discussions and the excellent food and scenery of the Brittany coast made the meeting thoroughly enjoyable. There were three main foci for this workshop: the type systems suitable for databases (especially object-oriented and complex-object databases,) the representation and manipulation of persistent structures, and extensions to deductive databases that allow for more general and flexible programming. Many of the papers describe recent results, or work in progress, and are indicative of the latest research trends in database programming languages. The organizers are extremely grateful for the financial support given by CRAI (Italy), Altaïr (France) and AT&T (USA). We would also like to acknowledge the organizational help provided by Florence Deshors, Hélène Gans and Pauline Turcaud of Altaïr, and by Karen Carter of the University of Pennsylvania

A process model of maintenance with reuse: an investigation and an implementation abstract

Sixty to eighty per cent of the software life-cycle cost is spent on the software maintenance phase because software maintenance is usually more difficult than original development and legacy systems are generally large and complex. Software reuse has recently been considered as a best solution to enhance the productivity of a software development team and to reduce maintenance costs. In addition, Software Configuration Management (SCM) is a central part of software maintenance as it is associated with changing existing software and is a discipline for controlling these changes. Thus, both software reuse and SCM have been proposed for making a significant improvement in productivity, quality and cost. However, so far these two technologies have been investigated separately. In order for software reuse and SCM to produce effects by synergy, both approaches require to be introduced into a maintenance environment together. Since software reuse and SCM, and software reuse and software maintenance have many similarities in their activities, these disciplines can be integrated within a software maintenance environment. This research has therefore developed an integrated process model for 'Maintenance with Reuse (MwR)', that supports SCM for a reuse library which is actively maintained for use in a software maintenance environment. This thesis addresses an integrated process model called the MwR model and its prototype tool TERRA (Tool for Evolution of a Reusable and Reconfigurable Assets Library) that consist of a configuration management (CM) process, reuse process, maintenance process and administration of a reuse library. The MwR model and TERRA provide reusers and maintainers with many activities of these four processes such as classifying, storing, retrieving, evaluating, and propagating reusable components, including controlling changes to both reusable components and existing systems. The process model of an integrated approach has been developed and validated using Process Weaver. The TERRA tool has been implemented on the WWW so that the prototype can provide portability, traceability, integration with existing tools, and a distributed maintenance environment. The TERRA prototype has been tested and evaluated through a scenario based case study. Several scenarios based on real data have been created and used for the case study so that an organisation can apply the model and tool to its maintenance environment without many problems. The software maintenance community is facing serious problems with legacy systems, such as a ever increasing frequency of changes and backlogs, lack of integrated tools and methods, and lack of software maintenance support environments. The control and management of changes to the software components in a reuse repository are crucial to successful software development and maintenance. If the component is being used in multiple systems effects of uncontrolled change are more critical. However, reuse libraries and servers currently available have not been successful as they do not support further development or maintenance of the reusable components. In addition, most of them are not sophisticated since they have not been linked to a development/maintenance environment. The integrated model of MwR can overcome many problems that exist in software maintenance and reuse through introduction of SCM functionalities into a maintenance environment. Thus, the integration of these common activities will greatly contribute to enhancing the productivity and quality of software, and will additionally lead to reducing the costs and backlogs of changes within a maintenance environment

Stepping Beyond the Newtonian Paradigm in Biology. Towards an Integrable Model of Life: Accelerating Discovery in the Biological Foundations of Science

The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an interdisciplinary community of original thinkers. This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit that biology to date has been more fact-oriented and less theoretical than physics. However, the key leverageable idea is that careful extension of the science of living systems can be more effectively applied to some of our most vexing modern problems than the prevailing scheme, derived from abstractions in physics. While these have some universal application and demonstrate computational advantages, they are not theoretically mandated for the living. A new set of mathematical abstractions derived from biology can now be similarly extended. This is made possible by leveraging new formal tools to understand abstraction and enable computability. [The latter has a much expanded meaning in our context from the one known and used in computer science and biology today, that is "by rote algorithmic means", since it is not known if a living system is computable in this sense (Mossio et al., 2009).] Two major challenges constitute the effort. The first challenge is to design an original general system of abstractions within the biological domain. The initial issue is descriptive leading to the explanatory. There has not yet been a serious formal examination of the abstractions of the biological domain. What is used today is an amalgam; much is inherited from physics (via the bridging abstractions of chemistry) and there are many new abstractions from advances in mathematics (incentivized by the need for more capable computational analyses). Interspersed are abstractions, concepts and underlying assumptions “native” to biology and distinct from the mechanical language of physics and computation as we know them. A pressing agenda should be to single out the most concrete and at the same time the most fundamental process-units in biology and to recruit them into the descriptive domain. Therefore, the first challenge is to build a coherent formal system of abstractions and operations that is truly native to living systems. Nothing will be thrown away, but many common methods will be philosophically recast, just as in physics relativity subsumed and reinterpreted Newtonian mechanics. This step is required because we need a comprehensible, formal system to apply in many domains. Emphasis should be placed on the distinction between multi-perspective analysis and synthesis and on what could be the basic terms or tools needed. The second challenge is relatively simple: the actual application of this set of biology-centric ways and means to cross-disciplinary problems. In its early stages, this will seem to be a “new science”. This White Paper sets out the case of continuing support of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for transformative research in biology and information processing centered on paradigm changes in the epistemological, ontological, mathematical and computational bases of the science of living systems. Today, curiously, living systems cannot be said to be anything more than dissipative structures organized internally by genetic information. There is not anything substantially different from abiotic systems other than the empirical nature of their robustness. We believe that there are other new and unique properties and patterns comprehensible at this bio-logical level. The report lays out a fundamental set of approaches to articulate these properties and patterns, and is composed as follows. Sections 1 through 4 (preamble, introduction, motivation and major biomathematical problems) are incipient. Section 5 describes the issues affecting Integral Biomathics and Section 6 -- the aspects of the Grand Challenge we face with this project. Section 7 contemplates the effort to formalize a General Theory of Living Systems (GTLS) from what we have today. The goal is to have a formal system, equivalent to that which exists in the physics community. Here we define how to perceive the role of time in biology. Section 8 describes the initial efforts to apply this general theory of living systems in many domains, with special emphasis on crossdisciplinary problems and multiple domains spanning both “hard” and “soft” sciences. The expected result is a coherent collection of integrated mathematical techniques. Section 9 discusses the first two test cases, project proposals, of our approach. They are designed to demonstrate the ability of our approach to address “wicked problems” which span across physics, chemistry, biology, societies and societal dynamics. The solutions require integrated measurable results at multiple levels known as “grand challenges” to existing methods. Finally, Section 10 adheres to an appeal for action, advocating the necessity for further long-term support of the INBIOSA program. The report is concluded with preliminary non-exclusive list of challenging research themes to address, as well as required administrative actions. The efforts described in the ten sections of this White Paper will proceed concurrently. Collectively, they describe a program that can be managed and measured as it progresses

Formalizing graphical notations

The thesis describes research into graphical notations for software engineering, with a principal interest in ways of formalizing them. The research seeks to provide a theoretical basis that will help in designing both notations and the software tools that process them. The work starts from a survey of literature on notation, followed by a review of techniques for formal description and for computational handling of notations. The survey concentrates on collecting views of the benefits and the problems attending notation use in software development; the review covers picture description languages, grammars and tools such as generic editors and visual programming environments. The main problem of notation is found to be a lack of any coherent, rigorous description methods. The current approaches to this problem are analysed as lacking in consensus on syntax specification and also lacking a clear focus on a defined concept of notated expression. To address these deficiencies, the thesis embarks upon an exploration of serniotic, linguistic and logical theory; this culminates in a proposed formalization of serniosis in notations, using categorial model theory as a mathematical foundation. An argument about the structure of sign systems leads to an analysis of notation into a layered system of tractable theories, spanning the gap between expressive pictorial medium and subject domain. This notion of 'tectonic' theory aims to treat both diagrams and formulae together. The research gives details of how syntactic structure can be sketched in a mathematical sense, with examples applying to software development diagrams, offering a new solution to the problem of notation specification. Based on these methods, the thesis discusses directions for resolving the harder problems of supporting notation design, processing and computer-aided generic editing. A number of future research areas are thereby opened up. For practical trial of the ideas, the work proceeds to the development and partial implementation of a system to aid the design of notations and editors. Finally the thesis is evaluated as a contribution to theory in an area which has not attracted a standard approach