Institutions formalize the intuitive notion of logical system, including syntax, semantics, and the relation of satisfaction between them. Our exposition emphasizes the natural way that institutions can support deduction on sentences, and inclusions of signatures, theories, etc.; it also introduces terminology to clearly distinguish several levels of generality of the institution concept. A surprising number of different notions of morphism have been suggested for forming categories with institutions as objects, and an amazing variety of names have been proposed for them. One goal of this paper is to suggest a terminology that is uniform and informative to replace the current chaotic nomenclature; another goal is to investigate the properties and interrelations of these notions in a systematic way. Following brief expositions of indexed categories, diagram categories, twisted relations, and Kan extensions, we demonstrate and then exploit the duality between institution morphisms in the original sense of Goguen and Burstall, and the "plain maps" of Meseguer, obtaining simple uniform proofs of completeness and cocompleteness for both resulting categories. Because of this duality, we prefer the name "comorphism" over "plain map;" moreover, we argue that morphisms are more natural than comorphisms in many cases. We also consider "theoroidal" morphisms and comorphisms, which generalize signatures to theories, based on a theoroidal institution construction, finding that the "maps" of Meseguer are theoroidal comorphisms, while theoroidal morphisms are a new concept. We introduce "forward" and "semi-natural" morphisms, and develop some of their properties. Appendices discuss institutions for partial algebra, a variant of order sorted algebra, two versions of hidden algebra, and...

In this work, we investigate various specification languages and their relation to Casl, the recently developed Common Algebraic Specification Language. In particular, we consider the languages Larch, OBJ3, CafeOBJ, ACT ONE, ASF, and HEP-theories, as well as various sublanguages of Casl that more or less directly correspond to these. All these languages are translated to an appropriate sublanguage of Casl. The translation mainly concerns the level of specification in-the-small: the logics underlying the languages are formalized as institutions, and representations among the institutions are developed. However, it is also considered how these translations interact with specification in-the-large. Thus, we obtain one hand translations of any of the abovementioned specification languages to an appropriate sublanguage of Casl. This allows us to take libraries and case studies that have been developed for other languages and re-use them in Casl. On the other hand, we set up institution repre...

It is well known that interpolation properties of logics underlying specification formalisms play an important role in the study of structured specifications, they have also many other useful logical consequences. In this paper, we solve the interpolation problem for Grothendieck institutions which have recently emerged as an important mathematical structure underlying heterogenous multi-logic specification. Our main result can be used in the applications in several different ways. It can be used to establish interpolation properties for multi-logic Grothendieck institutions, but also to lift interpolation properties from unsorted logics to their many sorted variants. The importance of the latter resides in the fact that, unlike other structural properties of logics, many sorted interpolation is a non-trivial generalisation of unsorted interpolation. The concepts, results, and the applications discussed in this paper are illustrated with several examples from conventional logic and algebraic specification theory.

The UniForM Workbench supports combination of Formal Methods (on a solid logical foundation), provides tools for the development of hybrid, real-time or reactive systems, transformation, verification, validation and testing. Moreover, it...

This paper studies the composition of modules that can hide information, over a very general class of logical systems called inclusive institutions. Two semantics are given for composition of such modules using five familiar operations, and a property called conservativity is shown necessary and sufficient for these semantics to agree. The first semantics extracts the visible properties of the result of composing the visible and hidden parts of modules, while the second uses only the visible properties of the components; the semantics agree when the visible consequences of hidden information are enough to determine the result of the composition. A number of "laws of software composition" are proved relating the composition operations. Inclusive institutions simplify many proofs.

We provide a semantic basis for heterogeneous specifications that not only involve different logics, but also different kinds of translations between these. We show that Grothendieck institutions based on spans of (co)morphisms can serve as a unifying framework providing a simple but powerful semantics for heterogeneous specification.

This paper surveys the logical and mathematical foundations of CafeOBJ, which is a successor of the famous algebraic specification language OBJ but adding several new primitive paradigms such as behavioural concurrent specification and rewriting logic. We first give a concise overview of CafeOBJ. Then we focus on the actual logical foundations of the language at two different levels: basic specification and structured specification, including also the definition of the CafeOBJ institution. We survey some novel or more classical theoretical concepts supporting the logical foundations of CafeOBJ together with pointing to the main results but without giving proofs and without discussing all mathematical details. Novel theoretical concepts include the coherent hidden algebra formalism and its combination with rewriting logic, and Grothendieck (or fibred) institutions. However for proofs and for some of the mathematical details not discussed here we give pointers to relevant publications. ...

CafeOBJ is an executable industrial strength multi-logic algebraic speci cation language which is a modern successor of OBJ and incorporates several new algebraic speci cation paradigms.

Data Types and Algebraic Semantics The history of programming languages, and to a large extent of software engineering as a whole, can be seen as a succession of ever more powerful abstraction mechanisms. The first stored program computers were programmed in binary, which soon gave way to assembly languages that allowed symbolic codes for operations and addresses. fortran began the spread of "high level" programming languages, though at the time it was strongly opposed by many assembly programmers; important features that developed later include blocks, recursive procedures, flexible types, classes, inheritance, modules, and genericity. Without going into the philosophical problems raised by abstraction (which in view of the discussion of realism in Section 4 may be considerable), it seems clear that the mathematics used to describe programming concepts should in general get more abstract as the programming concepts get more abstract. Nevertheless, there has been great resistance to u...

This paper gives an overview of the main features and methodologies of CafeOBJ by means of a collection of elegant examples. Therefore, this paper may also serve as a tutorial introduction to CafeOBJ. We hope that besides the strength of CafeOBJ, the reader will also appreciate the beauty of this language.