Formal specification

The word ontology has a long history in philosophy, in which it refers to the study of being as such. In information science, an ontology is an explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts, and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships among them. 

Having established the formal specification of the problem-solving framework, the next goal is to establish how the solution of example problems can be turned into relevant problem-solving experience (Section III). 

The algorithmic description of MPC dynamics given earlier outlined its essential elements and properties and provided a basis for implementations of the dynamics. However, a more formal specification of the evolution is required in order to make a link between the mesoscopic description and macroscopic laws that govern the system on long distance and time scales. This link will also provide us with expressions for the transport coefficients that enter the... 

Mechanically generate all verification conditions VCPjCTjA jA, ) from the formal specification of program, set S of tagged points, and inductive assertions assigned to the tagged points. 

The purpose of documentation is to explain the essential parts of a requirement, design, or implementation in a way that would not be obvious from the code itself. Think of all the documentation parts of development as writing this explanation. It includes model diagrams, examples, informal sketches, formal specifications, storyboards, tables, and so on only because they make the explanation clearer, uncover hidden issues and problems, and help you focus on some things while deferring details of others. 

And lastly, Pattern 14.42, Interpreting Models for Clients (p.646) provides concrete guidelines for reviewing formal specifications for clients or users. 

It is a very common experience with anyone who uses more formal specifications, that a single afternoon s work on a model at the beginning of a project can raise all kinds of subtle but important questions that would not have been noticed in writing the more conventional informal requirements and that would often not have been noticed until the coding stage —[rtoo late to solve the problem coherently. 

Like the language of an electrical hardware specification, a formal specification (with diagrams and formal descriptions) is not directed at end users. 

Positive and Negative. When reviewing concrete example of behaviors and states, include both an example that is valid according to the spec, and one that is invalid. Include the constraints imposed by static and dynamic invariants. Generalize from the invalid ones, and discuss how the informal specification prohibits them. Similarly, generalize the required valid cases, and discuss how the formal specification enforces them. 

Enables the pharmaceutical manufacturer to assess the technical, regulatory, and commercial compliance (or otherwise) of submitted bids against a formal specification... 

The object and collaboration diagrams are input to the OF-FMEA method. From this input we develop formal specification of component interactions. For this purpose we use CSP. Each component of the collaboration diagram becomes a CSP process with input and output channels as shown in the diagram. In addition to this we develop formal models of safety requirements of the system. The requirements are derived from the railway safety regulations. Each requirement is modeled as a CSP process and imposes some restrictions on the ordering of events in the system. The requirements refer to the events that are visible on Level 4 of our decomposition. 

We can verify consistency of the formal specifications using the FDR tool. During verification we compare the specification of the system (seen as composition of its components) with the specification of the safety requirements. During verification we check for each safety requirement if the following relation holds ... 

Formal specifications that were positively verified against the safety requirements are the input to the next step, the analysis of component failures. 

The product is manufactured with distinct limits and formalized specifications. 

Formats for the capture of molecular structures and reactions are obviously of paramount importance in chemical data mining. Fortunately, a lot of experience had been amassed before the invention of XML, so it was not necessary to start from the beginning. Computational chemists are used to using connectivity tables, and XML provides a very convenient syntax for their formal specification. 

Equation (2.27) is proposed as a formal specification of a partition function, useful for a typical case encountered in the molecular theory of solutions. It is not suggested to be a practical method of calculation. We have here obviously taken pains not to commit to any specific molecular coordinates, but such a typical formulation as Eq. (2.27) will be helpful in our subsequent formal development. 

Specifications evolve during this process to the point at which, in a marketing approval application, a formal specification can be set that encompasses all that has been learned about the drug substance and its formulations during development. 

Lead generation encompasses those basic discovery activities that create a new drug molecule and identify its pharmacological potential. The analytical chemistry involved at this stage is mostly concerned with identifying the qualitative structure of the molecule and measuring the purity of small bench-scale lots of the compound. Formal specifications are of little value at this stage. 

Likewise, when metabolites are prepared for metabolism and pharmacokinetic studies, the purity needs to be defined for accuracy of data generation. Although formal specifications are not set at this stage, analytical testing is performed and judgments are made as to the suitability of the materials for their intended purpose. 

Typical test parameters for solutions and suspensions would include appearance, drug content, impurity levels, and pH. Although formal specifications are not usually applied, an analytical certificate will be provided that accurately describes the quality of the product administered. For animal feedstuffs, in addition to drug and impurity content, an important test parameter is uniformity of content throughout the mix. As for drug substance, in the absence of formal specifications, an evaluation of the suitability of the dosing product for its intended use is made by a similar team of relevant experts. 

It is important to mention that metabolites will be needed to conduct pharmacokinetic (PK) studies, both in preclinical and in clinical development. These need to be of sufficient purity to allow accurate quantitative PK measurements. Again, formal specifications are not usually set, but an analytical certificate covering a number of parameters such as purity, structure, and related substances needs to be included. 

Two different specifications of OntoCAPE have been constructed A formal specification represents the ontology in a formal ontology language, such as DAML+OIL [609] or OWL [546]. A supplementary informal specification presents the ontology in a human-readable form and provides additional background information that cannot be coded within the ontology language. 

In the course of creating the formal specification, modeling errors were... 

In the formal specification of version 2.0, ontology modules are manifested through different XML namespaces [1060], each of which is stored in a single OWL file connections between the modules are realized by using the import mechanism provided by OWL. The partial models correspond to identically named directories in the formal specification. That way, they establish a directory structure for managing the OWL files. 

We provide a precise formal specification of the integration algorithm,. In... 

We used the specification in two ways First, IREEN was constructed by generating code from the formal specification (Fig. 3.41). Second, an implementation designed for industrial use was derived from the formal specification (Fig. 3.42). 

Internally, AHEAD is based on a formal specification as a programmed... 

A formal and abstract description of the internal structure and behavior of tools, in Fig. 6.1 called layer 3 and elsewhere conceptual modeling for tools, has two big advantages (1) It allows the interpretation of this description in order to quickly get to prototyping tools. (2) It is also the basis for more efficient realizations of tools, where the code is generated being based on the formal specification. 

In this paper we have explored their observation in greater depth. We have shown that this relationship must involve both the syntactic and semantic information of an ADT operation. We have illustrated that a convenient way to capture the syntax and semantics of an ADT operation is to use a formal specification notation based on predicate logic. By specifying ADT operations using pre- and post-conditions we have shown informally that a mapping can be established between a formally specified ADT and the antecedent and consequent parts of a production rule. We have further shown that including only rules which correspond to each of an ADTs op-... 

Throughout this paper we have used an idealised notation for both the ADT operations and the production rules. In the formal specification of the ADT operations we have used a notation in the style of VDM-SL (5) but supplemented it with conventional mathematical notation. We have also made liberal use of auxiliary functions to mask inessential detail. Further work is underway to explore in detail the development of a suitable and consistent notation which will permit ADT specifications to be recast in the notation of a powerful expert system such as CLIPS (6) and to investigate a means of constructing and analysing the directed graph referred to in section 3. 

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