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Towards formal open standards: formalizing a standard’s requirements

The case of RSS v2.0

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Abstract

Open standardization seems to be very popular among software developers as it simplifies the standard’s adoption by the software engineering. Formal specification methods, while very promising, are being adopted slowly as the industry seems to have little motivation to move into this territory. In this paper the authors present (1) the idea of applying formal specification techniques to open standards’ specifications, and (2) an example of a formal specification of the Rich Site Summary (RSS) v2.0 open standard. The authors provide evidence for the advantages of the open standards formal specification over natural language documentations: formal specifications are more concise, less ambiguous, more complete with respect to the original documentation and, when using certain kinds of specification languages, executable and reusable as they support module inheritance. The merging of formal specification methods and open standards allows (1) a more concrete standard design; (2) an improved understanding of the environment under design; (3) an enforced certain level of precision into the specification, and also (4) provides software engineers with extended property checking/verification capabilities, especially if they opt to use any algebraic specification language. The authors showcase how the RSS standard can be formally specified using an algebraic specification language and demonstrate how can that be beneficial.

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Acknowledgments

The authors of this paper would also like to extend their thanks to Iulia Adomnita, Thrushna Nalam, Golnaz S. Nejad and Jari Veijalainen for the useful and fruitful collaboration.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Heroon Polytechniou 9, 15780, Zografou, Greece

    Konstantinos Barlas & George Koletsos

  2. School of Information Sciences, University of Tampere, Kalevantie 4, 33100, Tampere, Finland

    Eleni Berki

  3. School of Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences, National Technical University of Athens, Heroon Polytechniou 9, 15780, Zografou, Greece

    Petros Stefaneas

Authors
  1. Konstantinos Barlas
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  2. Eleni Berki
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  3. Petros Stefaneas
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  4. George Koletsos
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Konstantinos Barlas.

Additional information

This research has been co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program ”Education and Lifelong Learning” of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF)—Research Funding Program: THALIS.

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Barlas, K., Berki, E., Stefaneas, P. et al. Towards formal open standards: formalizing a standard’s requirements. Innovations Syst Softw Eng 13, 51–66 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-016-0283-9

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