applications of the theory, and extract a unitary principle specifying how the focus semantic value interacts with semantic and pragmatic processes. A strong version of the theory has the effect of making lexical or construction-specific stipulation of a focus-related effect in association with focus

easily modelled. In this thesis a novel compositional approach to performance modelling is presented. This approach is based on a suitably enhanced process algebra, PEPA (Performance Evaluation Process Algebra). The compositional nature of the language provides benefits for model solution as well

of the subprocesses of composition, which collapses sequences of productions into single productions, and proceduralization, which embeds factual knowledge into productions. Once proceduralized, further learning processes operate on the skill to make the productions more selective in their range of applications

This paper is devoted to the formulation and investigation of a dynamic semantic interpretation of the language of first-order predicate logic. The resulting system, which will be referred to as `dynamic predicate logic', is intended as a first step towards a compositional, non

of the logic programming language Golog provides a natural formalism for automatically composing services on the Semantic Web. To this end, we adapt and extend the Golog language to enable programs that are generic, customizable and usable in the context of the Web. Further, we propose logical criteria

that for the determinate language, the set of resting points of a process completely characterizes its behavior on all inputs, since each process can be identified with a closure operator over the underlying constraint system. Very nat-ural definitions of parallel composition, communication and hiding are given

A database view is a portion of the data structured in a way suitable to a specific application. Updates on views must be translated into updates on the underlying database. This paper studies the translation process in the relational model. The procedure is as follows: first, a “complete ” set

, and the semantics of nondeterministic dataflow. Profunctors are shown to play a key role in relating models for concurrency and to support an interpretation as higher-order processes (where input and output may be processes). Two recent directions of research are described. One is concerned with a language

using recent techniques for modelling processes (Scaria et al., 2013)—for example, learning that visit-ing events start with arriving and end with leaving. We show how to closely inte-grate this information with theories of for-mal semantics, allowing complex compo-sitional inferences

to expect Web services to be integrated as part of workflow processes. The composition of workflow processes that model e-service applications differs from the design of traditional workflows, in terms of the number of tasks (Web services) available to the composition process, in their heterogeneity