The Concepts and Ontology of SiSL: A Situation-Centric Specification Language

The concept of situation proposed in Situ, a context aware service-centric model, is the instant status of a software system environment, including context values and user´s actions, as well as the predicated user´s desires, which are critical for service evolution because they usually reflect user´s requirements on the system. For better applying the situation theory in practice, it is essential to provide formal specification and explicit description for situations. In this paper, we present a situation-centric specification language - SiSL, which formalizes the situation-theoretic approach to humanintention-driven service evolution proposed in Situ using second order logic. SiSL classifies the entities and their relations that are used to reason about user´s behaviors in the software system domains, and it supports formal description of situations and intentions. SiSL provides a set of axioms which establish a theoretical framework for inferring pre-defined use´s desires and detecting new desires based on observations of user´s actions and context values. A case study of paper submission and review system - PaperSR - is used to explain the concepts and ontology of SiSL.