Defining A Formal Semantics For The Rosetta Specification

The Rosetta systems level design language [1, 2] is an emerging standard designed to address the integration of information across domains. Specifically, Rosetta directly supports specifying and integrating models whose basic computation models differ due to technology domain. Rosetta achieves this by providing a framework where models of computation and domain specific information can be defined and organized into ontologies. Rosetta domains provide domain specific specification capability that allows the definition of basic semantic definition units, models of computation, and engineering design and analysis domains. Rosetta users then extend these domains to define specific system models and combine models for analysis using a specification algebra. Similar to all languages, Rosetta has a syntax and a semantics, where the syntax is given by a grammar and defines what expressions are valid, and its semantics gives meaning to the syntax. However, due to Rosetta’s capability for integrating multiple domains, its semantics is not fixed like for other languages. It varies with the domain. In this paper, we propose a formal semantics for the Rosetta specification language using a denotational approach. In a previous paper [7], we provided an overview of the Rosetta language. We presented our application of units of semantics, described several models of computation and defined the corresponding domains in Rosetta. We used existing relations between domains, mainly extensions, to build a semi-lattice. In this paper, we define a formal semantics for the language. We use a notion of decomposition of semantics into modules. A first semantic module defines denotational functions for the framework. These functions are then adapted to address the specifics of domains corresponding to units of semantics. A different semantic module is defined for each such unit of semantics. All models of computation whose domains extend the same unit of semantics use the same denotational functions. In the next section, we describe some of the terms we use in this paper. We then define the denotational functions that provide semantics to the Rosetta framework. The description of denotational functions for state-based and event-based units of semantics follows. We finally conclude the paper with some related work and future work.