The Tenth OOPSLA Workshop on Behavioral Semantics -- Back to Basics

The continuing theme of the Workshop Series on Behavioral Semantics is to
foster precise and explicit specifications of business and system semantics.
The need to understand and specify semantics in this way, independently of any
(possible) realization, has been recognized for a while. Some progress has been
made in these areas, both in academia and in industry. However, in too many
cases only lip service to these ideas 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." However, with the rapid development of e-commerce and
agent-based systems, there is no human intermediary; if the system is not what
it is supposed to be then its user will quickly go to a competitor.

This year, the series will be celebrating its tenth anniversary by revisiting
the classics of the past while also looking to the future of the field. We
refer to this as "Back to Basics."

One of the unfortunate characteristics of Computer Science and Software
Engineering is a noteworthy lack of interest in work done in the past. It is
taken for granted that a two-year old book could not possibly still be
relevant. Yet books such as the Garmisch 1968 Conference on Software
Engineering show that many of the concepts considered now to be a recent
invention, have existed for a long time. This includes such concepts as pair
programming, component factories, the gross inadequacies of box-and-line
diagrams, the confusion generated by a set of tacit assumptions, among many
others. The level of presentation of the articles in this book is very high.
Systematic usage of the basic ideas from this book, as well as many other
classics, would prevent the enormous waste of effort resulting from reinventing
these ideas. For another example, although it has been known since 1847 that
classifications are dependent on the purpose of the classification, people
continue to believe that it is possible to create a classification system that
is context-independent.

Fortunately, we know a lot about the underlying concepts and constructs
including domain patterns. Many have been around for quite a while, some of the
basics were standardized in the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing,
and its usage, although not yet widespread, was discussed at the previous
OOPSLA workshops. In many cases, good concepts are successfully used in a
specific narrow area, and independently discovered and rediscovered again,
possibly under different names. This need not be the case. A lot of the basics
in computing are from mathematics, and so it may be of interest what areas of
mathematics ought to be taught and how. In this context, we certainly emphasize
teaching of thinking (in E.W. Dijkstra's words) rather than training in syntax
of new tools and technologies.

Different users of specifications currently may have serious difficulties in
reading and understanding them due to complexity and size of the
specifications. However, if the basic concepts used there are explained (and
the details ignored via abstraction) then these difficulties become resolved.
Simple and elegant concepts and constructs permit simple and elegant
representations thus making the specifications understandable to all their
readers. Furthermore, the explicit semantics of concepts and constructs we use
helps a lot in distinguishing between useful (in accordance with some explicit
criteria) and less useful technological artifacts massively introduced in
industry (and to some extent in academia).

As in all the workshops in this series, it is our goal to be a focal point of
bringing together theoreticians and practitioners to report their experience
with making semantics precise, clear, concise and explicit in (OO) business
specifications, business designs, and system specifications. We invite papers
varying from academic research (especially dealing with transferring theory
into practice) to industrial "war stories." This year there is an emphasis on
revisiting the classics both to "set the record straight" and to recapture
insights and ideas that might otherwise slip into oblivion.

We invite papers of about 5-10 pages in postscript or pdf formats. The deadline
for submission is September 1, 2001. Please email your paper(s) to
haimk@acm.org

The accepted papers, after rework by the authors, will be published, again as
usual, in the Workshop Proceedings. These Proceedings will be distributed
before the workshop.

The one-day workshop will take place at OOPSLA2001 in Tampa, Florida, in
mid-October 2001.

The organizers: Haim Kilov, Kenneth Baclawski.