Quality and Trust in the European Open Science Cloud

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) has the objective to provide a virtual environment offering open and seamless services for the re-use of research data across borders and scientific disciplines. This ambitious vision sets significant challenges that the research community must meet if the benefits of EOSC are to be realised. One of those challenges, which has both technical and cultural aspects, is to determine the “Rules of Participation” that enable users to assess the quality of the data and services provided through EOSC and thereby enable them to trust the data and services they access. This paper discusses some issues relevant to determining the Rules of Participation that will enable EOSC to meet these objectives. &nbsp

Component Composition in Business and System Modelling

Bespoke development of large business systems can be couched in terms of the composition of components, which are, put simply, chunks of development work. Design, mapping a specification to an implementation, can also be expressed in terms of components: a refinement comprising an abstract component, a concrete component and a mapping between them. Similarly, system extension is the composition of an existing component, the legacy system, with a new component, the extension. This paper overviews work being done on a UK EPSRC funded research project formulating and formalizing techniques for describing, composing and performing integrity checks on components. Although the paper focuses on the specification and development of information systems, the techniques are equally applicable to the modeling and re-engineering of businesses, where no computer system may be involved

FDR Explorer

AbstractIn this paper we describe the internal structures of FDR, the refinement model checker for Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), as well as an Application Programming Interface (API) allowing one to interact more closely with, and have fine grained control over, FDR's behaviour and data structures. With such information it is possible to create optimised CSP code to perform refinement checks that are more space/time efficient, hence enabling the analysis of more complex and data intensive specifications. This information is very valuable for both CSP users and tools that automatically generate CSP code, such as those related to security analysis generating test-cases as CSP processes. We also present a simple example of using the tool. Finally, we show how one can transform FDR's graph format into a graph notation (e.g., JGraph), hence enabling visualisation of Labelled Transition Systems (LTS) of CSP specifications

A semantic approach to interpolation

Craig interpolation is investigated for various types of formulae. By shifting the focus from syntactic to semantic interpolation, we generate, prove and classify a series of interpolation results for first-order logic. A few of these results non-trivially generalize known interpolation results; all the others are new. We also discuss someapplications of our results to the theory of institutions and of algebraic specifications,and a Craig-Robinson version of these results