Survey Description

The WWW has been the main information source for the FME-SoE survey carried out so far. This was completed by individual contacts (mostly by email) to course lecturers and by the information provided by the people who have replied to the FME-SoE call for participation, which was put on-line as soon as the subgroup was created.

At the time of writing, FME-SoE has surveyed 117 courses spreading over 58 higher-education institutions across 13 European countries and involving (at least) 91 academic staff.

Further to objective information (course name, contact person, WWW links etc), the courses have been tagged with subjective information in the form of keywords intended for contents classification («subjective» meaning that in many cases it was not obvious what to write, often because the course contents were not readily available).

Three different kinds of keyword were found to be relevant to the survey:

• main topics, or broad areas (38 keywords)
• notations/languages (24 keywords), and
• tools (39 keywords).

A glossary of all keyword acronyms can be found in appendix . Pointersto WWW sites describing such acronyms have been recorded wherever available. A total number of 365 websites have been browsed and recorded in the survey at the time of writing.

As soon as the collection of main topics, notations/languages and tools was found to be minimally representative, the prospect of organizing them in an FM ontology was considered. However, ontologies are hard to build and it was soon realized that such a task would demand far more effort and team-work than initially planned. So, it was decided to organize the available data in a provisional, simple FM body of knowledge structured in five broad areas:

• Foundations
• Formal specification paradigms
• Correctness, verification and calculation
• Formal semantics
• Support for executable specification
• Other Topics

At a lower level of rank, fourteen sub-areas could be identified:

• Set-theoretic/topological foundations of Formal Methods
• Logical foundations of Formal Methods
• Type-theoretic foundations of Formal Methods
• Algebraic foundations of Formal Methods
• Property oriented specification
• Model oriented specification
• Multi-paradigm specification
• Correct by construction
• Correct by verification
• Correct by machine checking
• Refinement techniques
• Programming language semantics
• Formalizing distribution, concurrency and mobility
• Declarative programming

The table in appendix frames all keywords into this two-layered hierarchical body of knowledge . Wherever possible, the entries in the table refer to the SEEK units mentioned earlier on, as well as to some of the units of the CC2001 CS body of knowledge (directly or indirectly) related to formal methods.