Detail

ZOO, an abstract semantic domain of object-orientation

Object-Orientation has proved to be a popular and useful paradigm in
the world of software systems. The analogy of individual and object
suggests that it can be useful to model natural systems, which often
comprise individuals that interact to give rise to a complex
collective behaviour.

This talk presents an abstract semantic domain of object
orientation. This work was done with the aim of building models with
an object-oriented structure in the formal language Z and to provide
a semantic domain for UML diagrams. The underlying model is simple,
set against set theory and the predicate calculus, and it has proved
to be a good setting to study and understand object-orientation.
Above all, ZOO has proved to be extremely flexible, enabling
modelling across a variety of domains and supporting the
multiple-semantic interpretation nature of UML diagrams. I’ll start
by presenting the main ideas surrounding ZOO. Then, I’ll show how it
can be used to model a simple software system and a simple natural
system with a very interesting reactive behaviour.