Tom Henzinger, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Edward A. Lee, Kees A. Vissers, and Jörn Janneck, UC Berkeley
vissers@eecs.berkeley.edu
The Semantics Project aims at improving interoperability between systems design tools. The main focus of this effort is on syntactical and semantical concepts and mechanisms that can serve as common abstractions for these tools to be built on.
Since we anticipate the need for very different approaches to systems design for interoperability, our approach is not to provide a monolithic specification, but rather to cover orthogonal aspects of systems design in such a way that tool builders can use an appropriate subset of these concepts. The result will be a pragmatic notion of interoperability based on a common set of fundamental concepts.
The Semantics Project currently works on the following aspects of this problem: abstract and concrete syntax for representing (aspects of) systems design, a general notion of transformation of these syntactic structures, different kinds of type system that allow the concise representation of semantical properties of the system, and of course a framework for the definition of the semantics of components and their interactions.