Standardizing Z Semantics Case for Support

sity of York since April 1992. He is responsible for the research and teaching activities of over 100 staa and over 400 students in the Department. The HEFC rated the Department's research at Grade 5*, and its teaching as Excellent in the most recent assessments. The Department won the 1996 Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education. Dr Mander was principal investigator on the Structured Analysis and Z (SAZ) project (GR/F98642) and the subsequent case study (GR/J81655). His current research interests include a study of concurrent engineering problems in software development, and a continuing interest in the relationship between formal and structured methods of speciication. Steve King has been a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York since October 1995. Before that he was a Research OOcer and part-time DPhil student in the Programming Research Group at Oxford University, and he has been working on Formal Methods, particularly the Z language, since 1984. While at Oxford, he was employed on the well-documented IBM CICS project, for which Oxford and IBM were awarded a Queen's Award for Technological Achievement in 1992. He has been a member of the ISO/BSI Z Standards Panel since its formation, and was recently appointed Deputy Convenor. His research interests are centered around the problems of developing code from Z speciications, and he has been involved in teaching Z courses since 1986, particularly to those in industry, but also at undergraduate and MSc level. He has been close to industry throughout his academic life { while at Oxford, he took a year's leave of absence to work full-time at IBM Hursley Park on the Z speciication of the CICS Application Programming Interface. The investigators propose to employ Dr Ian Toyn and Sam Valentine as researchers. Ian Toyn holds an open contract as a Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York. He is an active member of the ISO/BSI Z Standards Panel, having regularly attended meetings since late 1995 and provided feedback on earlier documents. He is the primary author of the BCS-Award winning tool CADiZ, which supports typechecking, browsing and reasoning about Z speciications. Particular strengths of CADiZ include its user interface, which allows manipulation of formulae in a typeset document, its support for Z being direct (as opposed to translation to another notation), which promises to make reasoning about schemas easier, and the closeness …