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Faculty / Organisational entity
Contrary to symbolic learning approaches, which represent a learned concept explicitly, case-based approaches describe concepts implicitly by a pair (CB; sim), i.e. by a measure of similarity sim and a set CB of cases. This poses the question if there are any differences concerning the learning power of the two approaches. In this article we will study the relationship between the case base, the measure of similarity, and the target concept of the learning process. To do so, we transform a simple symbolic learning algorithm (the version space algorithm) into an equivalent case- based variant. The achieved results strengthen the hypothesis of the equivalence of the learning power of symbolic and case-based methods and show the interdependency between the measure used by a case-based algorithm and the target concept.
A large set of criteria to evaluate formal methods for reactive systems is presented. To make this set more comprehensible, it is structured according to a Concept-Model of formal methods. It is made clear that it is necessary to make the catalogue more specific before applying it. Some of the steps needed to do so are explained. As an example the catalogue is applied within the context of the application domain building automation systems to three different formal methods: SDL, statecharts, and a temporallogic.
A new approach for modelling time that does not rely on the concept of a clock is proposed. In order to establish a notion of time, system behaviour is represented as a joint progression of multiple threads of control, which satisfies a certain set of axioms. We show that the clock-independent time model is related to the well-known concept of a global clock and argue that both approaches establish the same notion of time.
Coloring terms (rippling) is a technique developed for inductive theorem proving which uses syntactic differences of terms to guide the proof search. Annotations (colors) to terms are used to maintain this information. This technique has several advantages, e.g. it is highly goal oriented and involves little search. In this paper we give a general formalization of coloring terms in a higher-order setting. We introduce a simply-typed lambda calculus with color annotations and present an appropriate (pre-)unification algorithm. Our work is a formal basis to the implementation of rippling in a higher-order setting which is required e.g. in case of middle-out reasoning. Another application is in the construction of natural language semantics, where the color annotations rule out linguistically invalid readings that are possible using standard higher-order unification.
This paper develops a sound and complete transformation-based algorithm forunification in an extensional order-sorted combinatory logic supporting constantoverloading and a higher-order sort concept. Appropriate notions of order-sortedweak equality and extensionality - reflecting order-sorted fij-equality in thecorresponding lambda calculus given by Johann and Kohlhase - are defined, andthe typed combinator-based higher-order unification techniques of Dougherty aremodified to accommodate unification with respect to the theory they generate. Thealgorithm presented here can thus be viewed as a combinatory logic counterpartto that of Johann and Kohlhase, as well as a refinement of that of Dougherty, andprovides evidence that combinatory logic is well-suited to serve as a framework forincorporating order-sorted higher-order reasoning into deduction systems aimingto capitalize on both the expressiveness of extensional higher-order logic and theefficiency of order-sorted calculi.
This paper describes a system that supports softwaredevelopment processes in virtual software corporations. A virtual software corporation consists of a set of enterprisesthat cooperate in projects to fulfill customer needs. Contracts are negotiated in the whole lifecycle of asoftware development project. The negotiations really influence the performance of a company. Therefore, it isuseful to support negotiations and planning decisions with software agents. Our approach integrates software agentapproaches for negotiation support with flexible multiserver workflow engines.
The concept of the Virtual Software Corporation ( VSC) has recently become a practical reality as a result of advances in communication and distributed technologies. However, there are significant difficulties with the management of the software development process within a VSC. The main problem is the significantly increased communicational complexity of the process model for such developments. The more classic managerial hierarchy is generally replaced by a "flatter" network of commitments. Therefore new solution approaches are required to provide the necessary process support. The purpose of this paper is to present a solution approach which models the process based on deontic logic. The approach has been validated against a case study where it was used to model commitments and inter-human communications within the software development process of a VSC. The use of the formalism is exemplified through a prototype system using a layered multi-agent architecture.
This paper investigates the suitability of the mobile agents approach to the problem of integrating a collection of local DBMS into a single heterogeneous large-scale distributed DBMS. The paper proposes a model of distributed transactions as a set of mobile agents and presents the relevant execution semantics. In addition, the mechanisms which are needed to guarantee the ACID properties in the considered environment are discussed.
Information technology support for complex, dynamic, and distributed business processes as they occur in engineering domains requires an advanced process management system which enhances currently available workflow management services with respect to integration, flexibility, and adapt ation. We present an uniform and flexible framework for advanced process management on an a bstract level which uses and adapts agent technology from distributed artificial intelligence for both modelling and enacting of processes. We identify two different frameworks for applying agent tec hnology to process management: First, as a multi-agent system with the domain of process manag ement. Second, as a key infrastructure technology for building a process management system. We will then follow the latter approach and introduce different agent types for managing activities, products, and resources which capture specific views on the process.
This paper describes the architecture and concept of operation of a Framework for Adaptive Process Modeling and Execution (FAME). The research addresses the absence of robust methods for supporting the software process management life cycle. FAME employs a novel, model-based approach in providing automated support for different activities in the software development life cycle including project definition, process design, process analysis, process enactment, process execution status monitoring, and execution status-triggered process redesign. FAME applications extend beyond the software development domain to areas such as agile manufacturing, project management, logistics planning, and business process reengineering.
We provide an overview of UNICOM, an inductive theorem prover for equational logic which isbased on refined rewriting and completion techniques. The architecture of the system as well as itsfunctionality are described. Moreover, an insight into the most important aspects of the internalproof process is provided. This knowledge about how the central inductive proof componentof the system essentially works is crucial for human users who want to solve non-trivial prooftasks with UNICOM and thoroughly analyse potential failures. The presentation is focussedon practical aspects of understanding and using UNICOM. A brief but complete description ofthe command interface, an installation guide, an example session, a detailed extended exampleillustrating various special features and a collection of successfully handled examples are alsoincluded.
Cooperative decision making involves a continuous process, assessing the validity ofdata, information and knowledge acquired and inferred by the colleagues, that is, the shared knowledge space must be transparent. The ACCORD methodology provides aninterpretation framework for the mapping of domain facts - constituting the world model of the expert - onto conceptual models, which can be expressed in formalrepresentations. The ACCORD-BPM framework allows a stepwise and inarbitrary reconstruction of the problem solving competence of BPM experts as a prerequisite foran appropriate architecture of both BPM knowledge bases and the BPM-"reasoning device".
A map for an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) in an indoor environment for the purpose ofcontinuous position and orientation estimation is discussed. Unlike many other approaches, this map is not based on geometrical primitives like lines and polygons. An algorithm is shown , where the sensordata of a laser range finder can be used to establish this map without a geometrical interpretation of the data. This is done by converting single laser radar scans to statistical representations of the environ-ment, so that a crosscorrelation of an actu al converted scan and this representative results into the actual position and orientation in a global coordinate system. The map itsel f is build of representative scansfor the positions where the AMR has been, so that it is able to find its position and orientation by c omparing the actual scan with a scan stored in the map.
We present a mathematical knowledge base containing the factual know-ledge of the first of three parts of a textbook on semi-groups and automata,namely "P. Deussen: Halbgruppen und Automaten". Like almost all math-ematical textbooks this textbook is not self-contained, but there are somealgebraic and set-theoretical concepts not being explained. These concepts areadded to the knowledge base. Furthermore there is knowledge about the nat-ural numbers, which is formalized following the first paragraph of "E. Landau:Grundlagen der Analysis".The data base is written in a sorted higher-order logic, a variant of POST ,the working language of the proof development environment OmegaGamma mkrp. We dis-tinguish three different types of knowledge: axioms, definitions, and theorems.Up to now, there are only 2 axioms (natural numbers and cardinality), 149definitions (like that for a semi-group), and 165 theorems. The consistency ofsuch knowledge bases cannot be proved in general, but inconsistencies may beimported only by the axioms. Definitions and theorems should not lead to anyinconsistency since definitions form conservative extensions and theorems areproved to be consequences.
This paper addresses a model of analogy-driven theorem proving that is more general and cognitively more adequate than previous approaches. The model works at the level ofproof-plans. More precisely, we consider analogy as a control strategy in proof planning that employs a source proof-plan to guide the construction of a proof-plan for the target problem. Our approach includes a reformulation of the source proof-plan. This is in accordance with the well known fact that constructing ananalogy in maths often amounts to first finding the appropriate representation which brings out the similarity of two problems, i.e., finding the right concepts and the right level of abstraction. Several well known theorems were processed by our analogy-driven proof-plan construction that could not be proven analogically by previous approaches.
We investigate one of the classical problems of the theory ofterm rewriting, namely termination. We present an ordering for compar-ing higher-order terms that can be utilized for testing termination anddecreasingness of higher-order conditional term rewriting systems. Theordering relies on a first-order interpretation of higher-order terms anda suitable extension of the RPO.
The semantics of everyday language and the semanticsof its naive translation into classical first-order language consider-ably differ. An important discrepancy that is addressed in this paperis about the implicit assumption what exists. For instance, in thecase of universal quantification natural language uses restrictions andpresupposes that these restrictions are non-empty, while in classi-cal logic it is only assumed that the whole universe is non-empty.On the other hand, all constants mentioned in classical logic arepresupposed to exist, while it makes no problems to speak about hy-pothetical objects in everyday language. These problems have beendiscussed in philosophical logic and some adequate many-valuedlogics were developed to model these phenomena much better thanclassical first-order logic can do. An adequate calculus, however, hasnot yet been given. Recent years have seen a thorough investigationof the framework of many-valued truth-functional logics. UnfortuADnately, restricted quantifications are not truth-functional, hence theydo not fit the framework directly. We solve this problem by applyingrecent methods from sorted logics.
This report presents the properties of a specification of the domain of process planning for rotary symmetrical workpieces. The specification results from a model for problem solving in this domain that involves different reasoners, one of which is an AI planner that achieves goals corresponding to machining workpieces by considering certain operational restrictions of the domain. When planning with SNLP (McAllester and Rosenblitt, 1991), we will show that the resulting plans have the property of minimizing the use of certain key operations. Further, we will show that, for elastic protected plans (Kambhampati et al., 1996) such as the ones produced by SNLP, the goals corresponding to machining parts of a workpiece are OE-constrained trivial serializable, a special form of trivial serializability (Barrett and Weld, 1994). However, we will show that planning with SNLP in this domain can be very difficult: elastic protected plans for machining parts of a workpiece are nonmergeable. Finally, we will show that, for sufix, prefix or sufix and prefix plans such as the ones produced by state-space planners, it is not possible to have both properties, being OEconstrained trivial serializable and minimizing the use of the key operations, at the same time.
Even though it is not very often admitted, partial functionsdo play a significant role in many practical applications of deduction sys-tems. Kleene has already given a semantic account of partial functionsusing a three-valued logic decades ago, but there has not been a satisfact-ory mechanization. Recent years have seen a thorough investigation ofthe framework of many-valued truth-functional logics. However, strongKleene logic, where quantification is restricted and therefore not truth-functional, does not fit the framework directly. We solve this problemby applying recent methods from sorted logics. This paper presents atableau calculus that combines the proper treatment of partial functionswith the efficiency of sorted calculi.
A Tailored Real Time Temporal Logic for Specifying Requirements of Building Automation Systems
(1999)
A tailored real time temporal logic for specifying requirements of building automation systems is introduced and analyzed. The logic features several new real time operators, which are chosen with regard to the application area. The new operators improve the conciseness and readability of requirements as compared to a general-purpose real time temporal logic. In addition, some of the operators also enhance the expressiveness of the logic. A number of properties of the new operators are presented and proven.
Concept mapping is a simple and intuitive visual form of knowledge representation. Concept maps can be categorized as informal or formal, where the latter is characterized by implementing a semantics model constraining their components. Software engineering is a domain that has successfully adopted formal concept maps to visualize and specify complex systems. Automated tools have been implemented to support these models although their semantic constraints are hardcoded within the systems and hidden from users. This paper presents the Constraint Graphs and jKSImapper systems. Constraint Graphs is a flexible and powerful graphical system interface for specifying concept mapping notations. In addition, jKSImapper is a multi-user concept mapping editor for the Internet and the World Wide Web. Together, these systems aim to support user-definable formal concept mapping notations and distributed collaboration on the Internet and the World Wide Web.
The CBR team of the LISA is involved in several applied research projects based on the CBR paradigm. These applications use adaptation to solve the specific problems they face. So, we have capitalized some experience about how can be expressed and formalized adaptation processes. The bibliography on the subject is quite important but demonstrates a lake of formalism. At most, there exists some classifications about different types of adaptation.
We present a way to describe Reason Maintenance Systems using the sameformalism for justification based as well as for assumption based approaches.This formalism uses labelled formulae and thus is a special case of Gabbay'slabelled deductive systems. Since our approach is logic based, we are able toget a semantics oriented description of the systems in question.Instead of restricting ourselves to e.g. propositional Horn formulae, as wasdone in the past, we admit arbitrary logics. This enables us to characterizesystems as a whole, including both the reason maintenance component and theproblem solver, nevertheless maintaining a separation between the basic logicand the part that describes the label propagation. The possibility to freely varythe basic logic enables us to not only describe various existing systems, but canhelp in the design of completely new ones.We also show, that it is possible to implement systems based directly on ourlabelled logic and plead for "incremental calculi" crafted to attack undecidablelogics.Furthermore it is shown that the same approach can be used to handledefault reasoning, if the propositional labels are upgraded to first order.
Caching has long been used to reduce average access latency, from registers and memory pages cached by hardware, to the application level such as a web browser retaining retrieved documents. We focus here on the high-level caching of potentially shared networked documents and define two terms in relation to this type of caching: Zero latency refers to the condition where access to a document produces a cache hit on the local machine, that is, there is little or no latency due to the network (we assume that latency due to local disk and memory access is insignificant in comparison to network latency). A document with zero latency usually has been placed in the cache after a previous access, or has been pulled there through some prefetching mechanism. Negative latency refers to automatic presentation, or push, of a document to a user based on a prediction that the user will want that document. With an ideal system, a user would be presented with documents either that she was about to request, or that she would not know to request but that would be immediately useful to her.
We will answer a question posed in [DJK91], and will show that Huet's completion algorithm [Hu81] becomes incomplete, i.e. it may generate a term rewriting system that is not confluent, if it is modified in a way that the reduction ordering used for completion can be changed during completion provided that the new ordering is compatible with the actual rules. In particular, we will show that this problem may not only arise if the modified completion algorithm does not terminate: Even if the algorithm terminates without failure, the generated finite noetherian term rewriting system may be non-confluent. Most existing implementations of the Knuth-Bendix algorithm provide the user with help in choosing a reduction ordering: If an unorientable equation is encountered, then the user has many options, especially, the one to orient the equation manually. The integration of this feature is based on the widespread assumption that, if equations are oriented by hand during completion and the completion process terminates with success, then the generated finite system is a maybe non terminating but locally confluent system (see e.g. [KZ89]). Our examples will show that this assumption is not true.
The reasoning power of human-oriented plan-based reasoning systems is primarilyderived from their domain-specific problem solving knowledge. Such knowledge is, how-ever, intrinsically incomplete. In order to model the human ability of adapting existingmethods to new situations we present in this work a declarative approach for represent-ing methods, which can be adapted by so-called meta-methods. Since apparently thesuccess of this approach relies on the existence of general and strong meta-methods,we describe several meta-methods of general interest in detail by presenting the prob-lem solving process of two familiar classes of mathematical problems. These examplesshould illustrate our philosophy of proof planning as well: besides planning with thecurrent repertoire of methods, the repertoire of methods evolves with experience inthat new ones are created by meta-methods which modify existing ones.
INRECA offers tools and methods for developing, validating, and maintaining classification, diagnosis and decision support systems. INRECA's basic technologies are inductive and case-based reasoning [9]. INRECA fully integrates [2] both techniques within one environment and uses the respective advantages of both technologies. Its object-oriented representation language CASUEL [10, 3] allows the definition of complex case structures, relations, similarity measures, as well as background knowledge to be used for adaptation. The objectoriented representation language makes INRECA a domain independent tool for its destined kind of tasks. When problems are solved via case-based reasoning, the primary kind of knowledge that is used during problem solving is the very specific knowledge contained in the cases. However, in many situations this specific knowledge by itself is not sufficient or appropriate to cope with all requirements of an application. Very often, background knowledge is available and/or necessary to better explore and interpret the available cases [1]. Such general knowledge may state dependencies between certain case features and can be used to infer additional, previously unknown features from the known ones.
In this paper we generalize the notion of method for proofplanning. While we adopt the general structure of methods introducedby Alan Bundy, we make an essential advancement in that we strictlyseparate the declarative knowledge from the procedural knowledge. Thischange of paradigm not only leads to representations easier to under-stand, it also enables modeling the important activity of formulatingmeta-methods, that is, operators that adapt the declarative part of exist-ing methods to suit novel situations. Thus this change of representationleads to a considerably strengthened planning mechanism.After presenting our declarative approach towards methods we describethe basic proof planning process with these. Then we define the notion ofmeta-method, provide an overview of practical examples and illustratehow meta-methods can be integrated into the planning process.
Extending the planADbased paradigm for auto-mated theorem proving, we developed in previ-ous work a declarative approach towards rep-resenting methods in a proof planning frame-work to support their mechanical modification.This paper presents a detailed study of a classof particular methods, embodying variations ofa mathematical technique called diagonaliza-tion. The purpose of this paper is mainly two-fold. First we demonstrate that typical math-ematical methods can be represented in ourframework in a natural way. Second we illus-trate our philosophy of proof planning: besidesplanning with a fixed repertoire of methods,metaADmethods create new methods by modify-ing existing ones. With the help of three differ-ent diagonalization problems we present an ex-ample trace protocol of the evolution of meth-ods: an initial method is extracted from a par-ticular successful proof. This initial method isthen reformulated for the subsequent problems,and more general methods can be obtained byabstracting existing methods. Finally we comeup with a fairly abstract method capable ofdealing with all the three problems, since it cap-tures the very key idea of diagonalization.
Accelerating the maturation process within the software engineering discipline may result in boosts of development productivity. One way to enable this acceleration is to develop tools and processes to mimic evolution of traditional engineering disciplines. Principles established in traditional engineering disciplines represent high-level guidance to constructing these tools and processes. This paper discusses two principles found in the traditional engineering disciplines and how these principles can apply to mature the software engineering discipline. The discussion is concretized through description of the Collaborative Management Environment, a software system under collaborative development among several national laboratories.
Integrated project management means that design and planning are interleaved with plan execution, allowing both the design and plan to be changed as necessary. This requires that the right effects of change are propagated through the plan and design. When this is distributed among designers and planners, no one may have all of the information to perform such propagation and it is important to identify what effects should be propagated to whom when. We describe a set of dependencies among plan and design elements that allow such notification by a set of message-passing software agents. The result is to provide a novel level of computer support for complex projects.
This paper presents a new kind of abstraction, which has been developed for the purpose of proofplanning. The basic idea of this paper is to abstract a given theorem and to find an abstractproof of it. Once an abstract proof has been found, this proof has to be refined to a real proofof the original theorem. We present a goal oriented abstraction for the purpose of equality proofplanning, which is parameterized by common parts of the left- and right-hand sides of the givenequality. Therefore, this abstraction technique provides an abstract equality problem which ismore adequate than those generated by the abstractions known so far. The presented abstractionalso supports the heuristic search process based on the difference reduction paradigm. We give aformal definition of the abstract space including the objects and their manipulation. Furthermore,we prove some properties in order to allow an efficient implementation of the presented abstraction.
There are two general approaches to providing for isochronous streams in the current Internet. The first approach is the resource reservation approach through protocols such as RSVP, or ATM technology. This provides bandwidth guarantees, however, it also requires significant upgrading of resources in the underlying network. The other common approach is adaptive rate control where the end-system has control of its rate according to feedback from the client population. This approach cannot guarantee timely delivery and raises some scaling questions, however a properly implemented scheme does improve quality and it requires no changes to the underlying IP network. Hence, there exists a dichotomy of requirements ; 1. To cater for reservation protocols or 'hooks' for future reservation components, and 2. To provide an architecture which provides an application controlled QoS scheme, which scales to the size of the current Internet in a best- effort architecture.
An agent-based approach to managing distributed, multi-platform software development projects
(1999)
This paper describes work undertaken within the context of the P3 (Project and Process Prompter) Project which aims to develop the Prompter tool, a 'decision-support tool to assist in the planning and managing of a software development project'. Prompter will have the ability to help software project managers to assimilate best practice and 'know how' in the field of software project management and incorporate expert critiquing to assist with solving the complex problems associated with software project management. This paper focuses on Prompters agent- based approach to tackling the problems of distributed, platform independent support.
In 1978, Klop demonstrated that a rewrite system constructed by adding the untyped lambda calculus, which has the Church-Rosser property, to a Church-Rosser first-order algebraic rewrite system may not be Church-Rosser. In contrast, Breazu-Tannen recently showed that argumenting any Church-Rosser first-order algebraic rewrite system with the simply-typed lambda calculus results in a Church-Rosser rewrite system. In addition, Breazu-Tannen and Gallier have shown that the second-order polymorphic lambda calculus can be added to such rewrite systems without compromising the Church-Rosser property (for terms which can be provably typed). There are other systems for which a Church-Rosser result would be desirable, among them being X^t+SP+FIX, the simply-typed lambda calculus extended with surjective pairing and fixed points. This paper will show that Klop's untyped counterexample can be lifted to a typed system to demonstrate that X^t+SP+FIX is not Church-Rosser.
We propose an approach to the problem of proof control for our new first-order inductive theorem prover QuodLibet that is characterized by a great deal of flexibility w.r.t. the forms of proof control the prover supports. The approach is based on so-called (proof) tactics, i.e. proof control routines written in a special proof control language named QML. QuodLibet provides a set of tactics (in addition to the elementary inference rules), which range from tactics for trivial simplification steps to tactics representing comprehensive inductive proof strategies. Moreover, QuodLibet allows new tactics that are written by the user in QML to be integrated into the system to dynamically extend its functionality.
We describe a technique to make application programs fault tolerant. This techADnique is based on the concept of checkpointing from an active program to one ormore passive backup copies which serve as an abstraction of stable memory. Ifthe primary copy fails, one of the backup copies takes over and resumes processADing service requests. After each failure a new backup copy is created in order torestore the replication degree of the service. All mechanisms necessary to achieveand maintain fault tolerance can be added automatically to the code of a nonADfaulttolerant server, thus making fault tolerance completely transparent for the applicaADtion programmer.
In recent years the demand on business process modelling (BPM) became apparent in many different communities, e.g. information systems engineering, requirements engineering [KiB94], software engineering and knowledge engineering (e.g. [BrV94], [SWH+94]). This suggests to aim at a unifying view on business process modelling in all these disciplines. To achieve the business goals some problems which obstruct these goals must be solved. This can be done either by restructuring the business process, by application of standard software, or by developing individual software components such as knowledge based systems (KBSs). To be able to model business goals and to analyse problems occurring during the business processes these processes including organisational structures and activities have to be modelled. This is also true when building a KBS in an enterprise environment. Because the KBS is only a small part of the whole business organisation, it must be embedded into or at least linked to all relevant business processes, i.e. it should not be a stand-alone solution. For this purpose we extend the MIKE approach [AFS96] in the BMBF project WORKS (Work Oriented Design of Knowledge Systems) by offering business models for modelling relevant aspects of an enterprise. To be able to define an integrated framework with other possibilties to improve an enterprise (e.g. information systems engineering) we determine the standard views of an enterprise. Next we define the views, that are necessary for developing a KBS.
The development of complex software systems is driven by many diverse and sometimes contradictory requirements such as correctness and maintainability of resulting products, development costs, and time-to-market. To alleviate these difficulties, we propose a development method for distributed systems that integrates different basic approaches. First, it combines the use of the formal description technique SDL with software reuse concepts. This results in the definition of a use-case driven, incremental development method with SDL-patterns as the main reusable artifacts. Experience with this approach has shown that there are several other factors of influence, such as the quality of reuse artifacts or the experience of the development team. Therefore, we further combined our SDL-pattern approach with an improvement methodology known from the area of experimental software engineering. In order to demonstrate the validity of this integrating approach, we sketch some representative outcomings of a case study.
Mechanised reasoning systems and computer algebra systems have apparentlydifferent objectives. Their integration is, however, highly desirable, since in manyformal proofs both of the two different tasks, proving and calculating, have to beperformed. Even more importantly, proof and computation are often interwoven andnot easily separable. In the context of producing reliable proofs, the question howto ensure correctness when integrating a computer algebra system into a mechanisedreasoning system is crucial. In this contribution, we discuss the correctness prob-lems that arise from such an integration and advocate an approach in which thecalculations of the computer algebra system are checked at the calculus level of themechanised reasoning system. This can be achieved by adding a verbose mode to thecomputer algebra system which produces high-level protocol information that can beprocessed by an interface to derive proof plans. Such a proof plan in turn can beexpanded to proofs at different levels of abstraction, so the approach is well-suited forproducing a high-level verbalised explication as well as for a low-level machine check-able calculus-level proof. We present an implementation of our ideas and exemplifythem using an automatically solved extended example.
The increasing use of distributed computer systems leads to an increasingneed for distributed applications. Their development in various domains like of-fice automation or computer integrated manufacturing is not sufficiently sup-ported by current techniques. New software engineering concepts are needed inthe three areas 'languages', 'tools', and 'environments'. We believe that object-oriented techniques and graphics support are key approaches to major achieve-ments in all three areas. As a consequence, we developed a universal object-oriented graphical editor ODE as one of our basic tools (tool building tool).ODE is based on the object-oriented paradigm, with some important extensionslike built-in object relations. It has an extensible functional language which al-lows for customization of the editor. ODE was developed as part of DOCASE, asoftware production environment for distributed applications. The basic ideas ofDOCASE will be presented and the requirements for ODE will be pointed out.Then ODE will be described in detail, followed by a sample customization ofODE: the one for the DOCASE design language.
Several activities around the world aim at integrating object-oriented data models with relational ones in order to improve database management systems. As a first result of these activities, object-relational database management systems (ORDBMS) are already commercially available and, simultaneously, are subject to several research projects. This (position) paper reports on our activities in exploiting object-relational database technology for establishing repository manager functionality supporting software engineering (SE) processes. We argue that some of the key features of ORDBMS can directly be exploited to fulfill many of the needs of SE processes. Thus, ORDBMS, as we think, are much better suited to support SE applications than any others. Nevertheless, additional functionality, e. g., providing adequate version management, is required in order to gain a completely satisfying SE repository. In order to remain flexible, we have developed a generative approach for providing this additional functionality. It remains to be seen whether this approach, in turn, can effectively exploit ORDBMS features. This paper, therefore, wants to show that ORDBMS can substantially contribute to both establishing and running SE repositories.