BiLog: Spatial Logics for Bigraphs

Abstract

Bigraphs are emerging as a (meta-)model for concurrent calculi, like CCS, ambients, $\pi$-calculus, and Petri nets. They are built orthogonally on two structures: a hierarchical place graph for locations and a link (hyper-)graph for connections. Aiming at describing bigraphical structures, we introduce a general framework, BiLog, whose formulae describe arrows in monoidal categories. We then instantiate the framework to bigraphical structures and we obtain a logic that is a natural composition of a place graph logic and a link graph logic. We explore the concepts of separation and sharing in these logics and we prove that they generalise well known spatial logics for trees, graphs and tree contexts. As an application, we show how XML data with links and web services can be modelled by bigraphs and described by BiLog. The framework can be extended by introducing dynamics in the model and a standard temporal modality in the logic. However, in some cases, temporal modalities can be already expressed in the static framework. To testify this, we show how to encode a minimal spatial logic for CCS in an instance of BiLog