Unification and multiple views of data in Z
Eerke Boiten, John Derrick, Howard Bowman, Maarten W. A. Steen · Kent Academic Repository (University of Kent) · 1995
This paper discusses the unification of Z specifications, in particular specifications that maintain different representations of what is intended to be the same datatype. Essentially, this amounts to integrating previously published techniques for combining multiple viewpoints and for combining multiple views . It is shown how the technique proposed in this paper indeed produces unifications, and that it generalises both previous techniques. 1 Why unification? There is a wide interest in multiple-viewpoint specification in software engineering [FGH + 94, Jac94, ZJ93]. This method allows different specifiers to work independently, and to observe systems from various perspectives. Objects and behaviours in the system that are of interest to multiple viewpoints may have overlapping descriptions in each of those viewpoints. Due to the independence of viewpoints, however, the various descriptions need not be identical, and may even turn out to be contradictory, i.e. inconsistent. One de...