Reasoning about Requirements Evolution Using Clustered Belief Revision

During the development of system requirements, software system specifications are often inconsistent. Inconsistencies may arise for different reasons, for example, when multiple conflicting viewpoints are embodied in the specification, or when the specification itself is at a transient stage of evolution. These inconsistencies cannot always be resolved immediately. As a result, we argue that a formal framework for the analysis of evolving specifications should be able to tolerate inconsistency by allowing reasoning in the presence of inconsistency without trivialisation, and circumvent inconsistency by enabling impact analyses of potential changes to be carried out. This paper shows how clustered belief revision can help in this process. Clustered belief revision allows for the grouping of requirements with similar functionality into clusters and the assignment of priorities between them. By analysing the result of a cluster, an engineer can either choose to rectify problems in the specification or to postpone the changes until more information becomes available.

The Open Provenance Model Core Specification (v1.1)

The Open Provenance Model is a model of provenance that is designed to meet the following requirements: (1) To allow provenance information to be exchanged between systems, by means of a compatibility layer based on a shared provenance model. (2) To allow developers to build and share tools that operate on such a provenance model. (3) To define provenance in a precise, technology-agnostic manner. (4) To support a digital representation of provenance for any 'thing', whether produced by computer systems or not. (5) To allow multiple levels of description to coexist. (6) To define a core set of rules that identify the valid inferences that can be made on provenance representation. This document contains the specification of the Open Provenance Model (v1.1) resulting from a community-effort to achieve inter-operability in the Provenance Challenge series.