Formal specification methods have not been embraced wholeheartedly by the software development industry. We believe that a large part of industry’s reluctance is due to semantic gaps that are encountered when attempting to integrate formal specification with other stages of the software development process. Semantic gaps necessitate a dramatic shift in a programmer’s mode of thought, and underg...

Improvements in distributed computing, and the technologies that enable them, have led to significant advancements in middleware functionality and quality, mainly through networking and protocols. However, the distributed programing style has changed little over the years. Most programs are still written line per line of code in languages such as C, Cþþ, and Java. These conventional programs th...

The difficulty associated with programing existing robots is one of the main impediments to them finding application in domestic environments such as the home. A promising method for simplifying robot programing is Programing by Demonstration (PbD). Here, an end user can provide a demonstration of the task to be programed, with a PbD “interface” interpreting the demonstration in order to determ...

This paper describes a few ideas concerned with geographical information systems (GIS) development. Those ideas come from a GIS development project named GeKon, which is now held on the Department of Computer Science at CTU. The first of them deals with a huge semantic gap between the complex structure of real world and its representation in GIS. Some papers describe this problem as a consequen...