Bernd Krieg-Brückner – författare

This is the fourth volume in a series of books dedicated to basic research in spatial cognition. Spatial cognition is a field that investigates the connection between the physical spatial world and the mental world. Philosophers and researchers have p- posed various views concerning the relation between the physical and the mental worlds: Plato considered pure concepts of thought as separate from their physical manifestations while Aristotle considered the physical and the mental realms as two aspects of the same substance. Descartes, a dualist, discussed the interaction between body and soul through an interface organ and thus introduced a functional view that presented a challenge for the natural sciences and the humanities. In modern psych- ogy, the relation between the physical and the cognitive space has been investigated using thorough experiments, and in artificial intelligence we have seen views as diverse as ‘problems can be solved on a representation of the world’ and ‘a representation of the world is not necessary. ’ Today’s spatial cognition work establishes a correspondence between the mental and the physical worlds by studying and exploiting their interaction; it investigates how mental space and spatial “reality” join together in understanding the world and in interacting with it. The physical and representational aspects are equally important in this work. Almost all topics of cognitive science manifest themselves in spatial cognition.

This is the fourth volume in a series of books dedicated to basic research in spatial cognition. Spatial cognition is a field that investigates the connection between the physical spatial world and the mental world. Philosophers and researchers have p- posed various views concerning the relation between the physical and the mental worlds: Plato considered pure concepts of thought as separate from their physical manifestations while Aristotle considered the physical and the mental realms as two aspects of the same substance. Descartes, a dualist, discussed the interaction between body and soul through an interface organ and thus introduced a functional view that presented a challenge for the natural sciences and the humanities. In modern psych- ogy, the relation between the physical and the cognitive space has been investigated using thorough experiments, and in artificial intelligence we have seen views as diverse as ‘problems can be solved on a representation of the world’ and ‘a representation of the world is not necessary. ’ Today’s spatial cognition work establishes a correspondence between the mental and the physical worlds by studying and exploiting their interaction; it investigates how mental space and spatial “reality” join together in understanding the world and in interacting with it. The physical and representational aspects are equally important in this work. Almost all topics of cognitive science manifest themselves in spatial cognition.

This volume contains selected papers presented at theEuropean Symposium on Programming (ESOP) held jointly withthe seventeeth Colloquium on Trees in Algebra andProgramming (CAAP) in Rennes, France, February 26-28, 1992(the proceedings of CAAP appear in LNCS 581). The previoussymposiawere held in France, Germany, and Denmark. Everyeven year, as in 1992, CAAPis held jointly with ESOP.ESOP addresses fundamental issues and important developmentsin the specification and implementation of programminglanguages and systems. It continues lines begun in Franceand Germany under the names "Colloque sur la Programmation"and the GI workshop on "Programmiersprachen undProgrammentwicklung". The programme committee received 71submissions, from which 28 have been selected for inclusionin this volume.

This volume gives a coherent presentation of the outcome ofthe project PROSPECTRA (PROgram development by SPECificationand TRAnsformation) that aims to provide a rigorousmethodology for developing correct software and acomprehensive support system. The results are substantial: atheoretically well-founded methodology covering the wholedevelopment cycle, a very high-level specification andtransformation language family allowing meta-programdevelopment and formalization of the development processitself, and a prototype development system supportingstructure editing, incremental static-semantic checking,interactive context-sensitivetransformation andverification, development of transformation (meta-)programs, version management, and so on, with an initiallibraryof specifications and a sizeable collection ofimplemented transformations. The intended audience for thisdocumentation is the academic community working in this andrelated areas and those members of the industrial communityinterested in the use of formal methods.

The aim of software engineering is the provision and investigation of methods for the development of software systems of high quality with correctness as a key issue. A system is called correct if it does what one wants, if it meets the requirements. To achieve and to guarantee correct systems, the need of formal methods with rigorous semantics and the possibility of verification is widely accepted. Algebraic specification is a software engineering approach of this perspective. When Liskov and Zilles, Guttag and the ADJ-group with Goguen, Thatch­ er, Wagner and Wright introduced the basic ideas of algebraic specification in the mid seventies in the U. S. A. and Canada, they initiated a very successful and still flourishing new area. In the late seventies, algebraic specification became a major research topic also in many European countries. Originally, the algebraic framework was intended for the mathematical foundation of ab­ stract data types and the formal development of first-order applicative pro­ grams. Meanwhile, the range of applications has been extended to the precise specification of complete software systems, the uniform definition of syntax and semantics of programming languages, and to the stepwise development of correct systems from the requirement definitions to the running programs. The activities in the last 25 years have led to an abundance of concepts, methods, approaches, theories, languages and tools, which are mathemati­ cally founded in universal algebra, category theory and logic.