EXECUTIVE COUNCIL REPORT

Heike Scheuerpflug

The majority of activities in the network over the past four months were related to the preparation of the second review which was scheduled for January 2004 in Brussels and its results.

Review Meeting
In collaboration with the European Commission the second review meeting was held on 26 January in Brussels. Jutta Eusterbrock (GER), Manuel J. Fernandez Iglesias (ES) and Marie Redmond (IRL, rapporteur) were invited to review the progress of CoLogNET. The reviewers and the Commission described the overall appraisal of the project as follows: The project has been working for the past year on a range of activities designed to consolidate and enhance the network and as well as the education activities. Extensive time and resources have been spent on developing the portal web site and to publicising and promoting links with industry in order to encourage technology transfer.

Among the main achievements of the second year of the project the reviewers listed:
- Success in the promotion of a network on Formal Methods in industry (ForTIA).
- Promotion of computational logic among researchers through workshops.
- Organization of a publication scheme with the participation of major publishers (Springer, Kluwer, North Holland, OUP.)
- Organization of a trans-national educational program on computational logic.
However, the second review report objected to the network’s implementation of the portal of computational logic. Despite our believe to be in line with the relatively vaguely defined recommendations set out in the first review report, the Commission and the reviewers strongly recommended a re-design of the website in the second review. “The portal web site www.colognet.org needs to be re-designed and re-launched. This aspect of the project is critical to the overall success of the project as it will be instrumental in building a community of practitioners and researchers in Computational Logic in Europe and worldwide.” This criticism appears to be justified and we started immediately to implement their recommendations.

CoLogNET Portal
Our opinions about the portal are divided and so are the different proposals for improvement. This is why a website task force was set up to decide on the information architecture and a complete re-design to comply with the web accessibility guidelines of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The website task force (WTF) consists of Jorg Siekmann (DFKI GmbH Saarbrucken) Francesca Rossi (University of Padova), Odinaldo Rodriguez (King’s College, London), Vesna Sabljakovic (TU Vienna), Daniel Kurushin (TU Vienna), Vincent Jacobs (University of Utrecht), Daniel Cabeza Gras (UPM, Madrid) and Heike Scheuerpflug (DFKI GmbH Saarbrucken). The WTF will report to the Executive Council of CoLogNET. A website task force meeting was held on 25 and 26 March in Saarbrucken. Proposals for a re-design were presented by EURICE, SMART Design, TU Vienna. The different proposals were discussed and evaluated at the meeting. The WTF opted for the approach of TU Vienna and the Lixto technology to realise the data integration, implementation of the search facilities & re-design.

Technology Transfer
The formal methods task force (TF1) sponsored and organized a full-day meeting at FM 2003, the 12th International FME Symposium, Pisa, Italy, September 8-14, 2003, devoted to formal methods and industry. This industrial day(I-Day) provided a unique opportunity for engineers and managers in industry to share their experience, technology. The I-Day aimed at all formal methods researchers wishing to keep in touch with the needs of practitioners. The industrial day took part at September 9, 2003. The welcome session was chaired by John Fitzgerald, Centre for Software Reliability, Newcastle; Dines Bjorner, Techn. University of Denmark and two sessions were organized with invited talks, a presentation of FM industrial papers and an I-Day Closing session (Dines Bjorner, John Fitzgerald and Kouichi Kishida, SRA Japan). About 45 participants took part in the all day meeting. Topics for the day included the FM market, state of the art and future directions, the role of formal specifications and logics in phases of development including design and testing, technology transfer, suggested areas for academic research and tools development. The I-Day sessions were closed by a talk of Kouichi Kishida, SRA, Japan. Title: “Lookong Back to the Future – Thoughts on Paradigm Shift in Software Development.” The major event at the Industrial Day at Pisa was the formal founding of ForTIA, the Formal Techniques Industry Association. ForTIA has currently 30+ members worldwide. Up to now the members are from Japan (39), India, Russia (2), Northern America (2) and the rest from Europe.

TF 2 organised several high-level industrial events:
- A CoLogNet Workshop about Implementation Technology for Computational Logic Systems (ITCLS 2003) at FM 2003 with one invited speaker from industry
- The FACS’03 workshop about formal aspects of component software at FM 2003 The workshop was organised by the International Institute for Software Technology, the United Nations University. The objective of this workshop was to bring together researchers in the areas of software engineering and formal methods to clarify and discuss the issues in component-based software development. The workshop had some 40 registered participants and 3 invited speakers: Manfred Broy (Technical University of Munich, Germany), He Jifeng (UNU/IIST, Macau), Tom Maibaum (King's College, London University, UK)
- Invited talk of Mr. Mark Wallace, the deputy director of IC PARC (London), a research center of Imperial College which is mainly devoted to constraint logic programming languages at CP 2003, Kinsale, His talk was on “Languages versus Packages for Constraint Problem Solving”. Mark Wallace is. A Eclipse School was co-located with CP 2003. The purpose of the Eclipse school was to introduce the features of Eclipse which supports more than just finite domains.
- Invited speaker, Dr. Werner Ceuster at the 2nd COlogNET-ELSNET Symposium co-located with the 14th Amsterdam Colloquium, held on 18th December 2003, University of Amsterdam.

Summary & Outlook
The second periodic progress report including cost statements was submitted to the Commission on 02 March 04 but no feedback has been received so far. The amendment contract was forwarded to the consortium for signature on 18 March 04. The amendment contract will be counter-signed by the Commission and then sent to the consortium. The time frame for the implementation of the recommendations set out in the second review report submitted on 13 February 04 is rather tight. This effort demands all resources available in the network to meet the online review scheduled for the end of June. The next Executive Council meeting is scheduled for 23 April 04 at King’s College, London. The main objective of this meeting is to decide on the future of CoLogNET. A website and ERASMUS MUNDUS workshop will be co-located with the EC meeting in London and all partners are invited to participate in the workshops. ?