Semantic Web for extending and linking formalisms

Abstract

The diversity of various formal specification techniques and the need for their effective combinations requires an extensible and integrated supporting environment. The Webpro vides infrastructure for such an environment for formal specification and design because it allows sharing of various design models and provides hyper textual links among the models. Recently the Semantic WebActivit y proposed the idea of having data on the webdefined and linked in a way that it can be used for automation, extension and integration. The success of the Semantic Webma y have profound impact on the weben vironment for formal specifications, especially for extending and integrating different formalisms. This paper demonstrates how RDF and DAML can be used to build a Semantic Web environment for supporting, extending and integrating various formal specification languages. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how RDF query techniques can facilitate specification comprehension. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.