Practical Foundations of Business System Specifications

"In the mathematics I can report no deficience, except that it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the pure mathematics, in that they do remedy and cure many defects in the wit and faculties intellectual. For if the wit be too dull, they sharpen it; if too wandering, they fix it; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract it. " Roger Bacon (1214?-1294?) "Mathematics-the art and science of effective reasoning. " E. W. Dijkstra, 1976 "A person who had studied at a good mathematical school can do anything. " Ye. Bunimovich, 2000 This is the third book published by Kluwer based on the very successful OOPSLA workshops on behavioral semantics (the first two books were published in 1996 [KH 1996] and 1999 [KRS 1999]). These workshops fostered precise and explicit specifications of business and system semantics, independently of any (possible) realization. Some progress has been made in these areas, both in academia and in industry. At the same time, in too many cases only lip service to elegant specifica tions of semantics has been provided, and as a result the systems we build or buy are all too often not what they are supposed to be. We used to live with that, and quite often users relied on human intermediaries to "sort the things out. " This approach worked perfectly well for a long time.

1 Service-oriented Business and System Specification: Beyond Object-orientation.- 2 Formalization of Situation Awareness.- 3 From RM-ODP to the formal behavior representation.- 4 Towards the specification of software development processes: An information modeling approach.- 5 .NET Contracts: Attaching Specifications to Components.- 6 From Box-and-Line Drawings to Precise Specifications: Using RM-ODP and GRM to Specify Semantics.- 7 Domain Models of "The Market" - in Preparation for ?-Transaction Systems.- 8 Mathematics of UML: Making the Odysseys of UML less dramatic.- 9 Using Roles to Characterize Model Families.- 10 Business Modeling: Modeling the Business Modeling and IT Businesses.- 11 Flow-Service-Quality (FSQ) Engineering for Specification of Complex Systems.- 12 Describing Architectures Using RM-ODP.- 13 Extending UML for Agent-Based Systems.- 14 A Program for Building a State of the Art Enterprise Ontology: Report on Progress.- 15 Refactoring of Programs and Specifications.- 16 Using Information Modeling to Initiate Business Strategies - A Case Study for the E-Publishing Industry.- 17 Games, Complexity and Interaction: The Role of Games in Computer Science.- Author Index.