This paper is intended to serve as a comprehensive introduction to the emerging field concerned with the design and use of ontologies. We observe that disparate backgrounds, languages, tools, and techniques are a major barrier to effective communication among people, organisations, and/or software

The majority of work carried out in the formal methods community throughout the last three decades has (for good reasons) been devoted to special languages designed to make it easier to experiment with mechanized formal methods such as theorem provers, proof checkers and model checkers

TSIMMIS -- The Stanford-IBM Manager of Multiple Information Sources -- is a system for integrating information. It o ers a data model and a common query language that are designed to support the combining of information from many different sources. It also o ers tools for generating automatically

information in a uniform and language generic way. Thus it acts as a powerful link integrating diverse tools in such formal environments. We have implemented higherorder abstract syntax, a supporting matching and unification algorithm, and some clients in Common

This paper outlines a framework which supports the use of multiple perspectives in system development, and provides a means for developing and applying systems design methods. The framework uses "viewpoints" to partition the system specification, the development method and the formal

System-level design issues become critical as implementation technology evolves toward increasingly complex integrated circuits and the time-to-market pressure continues relentlessly. To cope with these issues, new methodologies that emphasize re-use at all levels of abstraction are a “must

that uses pattern languages to capture this knowledge in software development, HCI, and the application domain. A formal, domain-independent definition of design patterns allows for computer support without sacrificing readability, and pattern use is integrated into the usability engineering lifecycle

process; formal methods lack tools; formal methods replace traditional engineering design methods; formal methods only apply to software; formal methods are unnecessary; formal methods are not supported; and formal-methods people always use formal methods.

, an engineer can use these components for designing, verifying, and validating a system with support from formal methods and their tools under a uniform visual user interface – without even knowing the details of the underlying formal methods. In this paper, we outline the basic idea, the concepts

for the manipulation of requirements and software design documents and provides more or less sophisticated assistance for keeping these documents in a consistent state. Up to now almost all of these data consistency observing or preserving integration tools are hand-crafted due to the lack of generic implementation