Semantics Of Procedures Research Articles

БОРТНИЙ ДУБ НА МЕЖІ: РЕЛІКТИ ІНДОЄВРОПЕЙСЬКОГО ЗВИЧАЄВОГО ПРАВА У ДАВНЬОРУСЬКИХ ТА СТАРОУКРАЇНСЬКИХ ПАМ’ЯТКАХ XI–XVII СТ.

The article tends to show the hidden semantics of Old Ukrainian customary law procedures concerning the land boundaries’ marking. The author used a comparativehistorical approach. At first, the main significant elements of boundaries marking and making were distinguished in the range of historical sources (the Book of Kyiv Chamberlaine Court, City Book of Poltava, Kyivan Rus princes’ charts from 14 c., «Rus’ka Pravda», and South Russian acts from 17 c., which are ethnographically close to Ukrainian material). These elements comprise: circular movements («obyizd», «obkhid», «zayizd», «uyizd»), sings («gran’», «kopci»), and especially oaks and trees with bee-hives («bort’»). Since in the cognate Indo-European traditions, an oak is known to be a tree of a thunder-god, a comparative analysis of land boundaries setting laws of Hittite, Old Indic, and Old Irish traditions was undertaken. Mythological notion of an oak and bees in Baltic other Indo-European folklores were considered as well. All elements of Old Ukrainian rite of boundary setting have ancient mythological semantics. The circular motion around a certain territory had special semantics in the Hittite and Old Indian traditions, where the ruler undertook a yearly tour of his domain. In Ancient Irish laws, an oak was one of the main boundary marks. An oak as a tree that belonged to the thunder-god had a specific semantics in Baltic beliefs, where it was connected both with bees and Perkons. The approach suggested in the article is a new, original one, and may enhance reconsidering the significance of old chancery documents as a possible source for studies in mythological outlook survivals among the inhabitants of old Ukrainian territories, as well as to trace the inheritance of law procedures at stylistic level from the time of Kyivan Rus up to 17 c.

Infinite arguments and semantics of dialectical proof procedures

We study the semantics of dialectical proof procedures. As dialectical proof procedures are in general sound but not complete wrt admissibility semantics, a natural question here is whether we could give a more precise semantical characterization of what they compute. Based on a new notion of infinite arguments representing (possibly infinite) loops, we introduce a stricter notion of admissibility, referred to as strict admissibility, and show that dialectical proof procedures are in general sound and complete wrt strict admissibility.

EXACT2: the semantics of biomedical protocols.

BackgroundThe reliability and reproducibility of experimental procedures is a cornerstone of scientific practice. There is a pressing technological need for the better representation of biomedical protocols to enable other agents (human or machine) to better reproduce results. A framework that ensures that all information required for the replication of experimental protocols is essential to achieve reproducibility.MethodsWe have developed the ontology EXACT2 (EXperimental ACTions) that is designed to capture the full semantics of biomedical protocols required for their reproducibility.To construct EXACT2 we manually inspected hundreds of published and commercial biomedical protocols from several areas of biomedicine. After establishing a clear pattern for extracting the required information we utilized text-mining tools to translate the protocols into a machine amenable format. We have verified the utility of EXACT2 through the successful processing of previously 'unseen' (not used for the construction of EXACT2) protocols.ResultsThe paper reports on a fundamentally new version EXACT2 that supports the semantically-defined representation of biomedical protocols. The ability of EXACT2 to capture the semantics of biomedical procedures was verified through a text mining use case. In this EXACT2 is used as a reference model for text mining tools to identify terms pertinent to experimental actions, and their properties, in biomedical protocols expressed in natural language. An EXACT2-based framework for the translation of biomedical protocols to a machine amenable format is proposed.ConclusionsThe EXACT2 ontology is sufficient to record, in a machine processable form, the essential information about biomedical protocols. EXACT2 defines explicit semantics of experimental actions, and can be used by various computer applications. It can serve as a reference model for for the translation of biomedical protocols in natural language into a semantically-defined format.

Structural operational semantics through context-dependent behaviour

We present a new approach to providing a structural operational semantics for imperative programming languages with concurrency and procedures. The approach is novel because we expose the building block operations—variable assignment and condition checking—in the labels on the transitions; these form the context-dependent behaviour of a program. Using this style results in two main advantages over standard formalisms for imperative programming language semantics: firstly, our individual transition rules are more concise, and secondly, we are able to more abstractly and intuitively describe the semantics of procedures, including by-value and by-reference parameters. Standard techniques in the literature tend to result in complex and hard-to-read rules for even simple language constructs when procedures and parameters are dealt with. Our semantics for procedures utilises the context-dependent behaviour in the transition label to handle variable name scoping, and defines the semantics of recursion without requiring additional rules. In contrast with Plotkin’s seminal structural operational semantics paper, we do not use locations to describe some of the more complex language constructs. Novel aspects of the abstract syntax include local states (in contrast to a single global store), which simplifies the reasoning about local variables, and a command for dynamically renaming variables (in contrast to mapping variables to locations), which simplifies the reasoning about the effect of procedures on by-reference parameters.

The Semantics of Procedures and Diseases in SNOMED® CT

SNOMED CT is emerging as a reference terminology for the entire health care process. It claims to be founded on logic-based modelling principles. In this article, we analyze a special encoding scheme for diseases and procedures in SNOMED CT, the so-called relationship groups (RGs), which had been devised to avoid ambiguities in definitions. We reformulate SNOMED CT's relationship groups in the format of description logics in order to check whether RGs serve the needs they were designed for. We show that a considerable proportion of relationship groups represent hidden mereological relations. We also report discrepancies encountered between the defined semantics of many SNOMED CT terms and their intuitive meaning, as well as inconsistencies detected between the definition of various complex composed terms and the definition of their top-level parents. We formulate recommendations for improving SNOMED CT by replacing most occurrences of relation groups by formally more adequate "part-of" relations.

Predicate Transformers for Recursive Procedures with Local Variables

Abstract. The weakest precondition semantics of recursive procedures with local variables are developed for an imperative language with demonic and angelic operators for unbounded nondeterminate choice. This does not require stacking of local variables. The formalism serves as a foundation for a proof rule for total correctness of (mutually) recursive procedures with local variables. This rule is illustrated by a simple example. Its soundness is proved for arbitrary well-founded variant functions.

Inductive assertion method for logic programs

Certain properties of logic programs are inexpressible in terms of their declarative semantics. One example of such properties would be the actual form of procedure calls and successes which occur during computations of a program. They are often used by programmers in their informal reasoning. In this paper, the inductive assertion method for proving partial correctness of logic programs is introduced and proved sound. The method makes it possible to formulate and prove properties which are inexpressible in terms of the declarative semantics. An execution mechanism using the Prolog computation rule and arbitrary search strategy (e.g., OR-parallelism or Prolog backtracking) is assumed. The method may also be used to specify the semantics of some extra-logical built-in procedures for which the declarative semantics is not applicable.

Rules of inference for procedure calls

The semantics of procedures and parameters were formalized by Hoare [2] in terms of axioms and rules of inference. Igarashi et al. [4] reformulated Hoare's system. This paper extends their rule of inference for procedure calls to allow None of these are allowed in Hoare's system or the system of Igarashi, London and Luckham. An attractive feature of these extensions is that they do not increase the complexity of the rules of inference.