Dagstuhl Seminar 9403
Relational Methods in Computer Science
( Jan 17 – Jan 21, 1994 )
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Organizers
- Ch. Brink
- G. Schmidt
Contact
This Dagstuhl-Seminar has been attended by 35 computer scientists, logicians, and mathematicians from 14 countries and 5 continents.
Since the mid-1970’s it had become clear that the calculus of relations is a fundamental conceptual and methodological tool in Computer Science just as much as in Mathematics. A number of seemingly distinct areas of research have in fact this much in common that their concepts and/or techniques come from the calculus of relations. However, it had also become clear that many opportunities for cross-pollination are being lost simply because there was no organised forum of discussion between researchers who, though they use the same concepts and methods, nonetheless perceive themselves as working in different fields.
The aim of this Dagstuhl Seminar was, therefore, to bring together researchers from various subdisciplines of Computer Science and Mathematics, all of whom use relational methods in their work, and to encourage the creation of an active network continuing after the Seminar to exchange ideas and results.
The talks focussed in particular on Relational Models of Program Semantics, Kripke Semantics of Program Logic (including relational approaches to e. g. dynamic logics, temporal logics, and modal logics), Jónsson-Tarski Relation Algebras, and Relational Calculi and Methods in Application Fields such as Databases, Computational Linguistics, Semantic Nets and Knowledge Representation.
It was felt that the meeting was a really necessary one to bring people together. A successor seminar is loosely planned to take place in Rio de Janeiro around July/August 1995. It is planned to have a collection of papers around the topic of the seminar published in a separate volume thereby trying to do some work in the direction of standardizing notation.
We want to thank all participants for their presentations and discussions. Our special thanks go to the Dagstuhl board for accepting this seminar to be held in SchloßDagstuhl. As always, Dagstuhl proved to be a perfect site with regard to lodging, leisuring, and lecturing. We appreciated the work of the Dagstuhl staff, who made us feel comfortable and enabled us to concentrate on our work. The technical staff in our home institutions greatly helped us in preparing the meeting and we owe them our sincere gratitude. Finally, thanks go to Claudia Hattensperger, who edited this report, based on the abstracts of the participants.
- Ch. Brink
- G. Schmidt