Extending standards with formal methods: Open Document Architecture

Formal methods, while very promising, are being adopted by software/protocol engineers very slowly, as the industry has little motivation to move into this new, unknown territory. At the same time, new industrial standards are being released quite frequently, as standardization seems to be very popular among developers. In this paper we present the idea of blending formal methods with industry standards. We claim that this results in more concrete system design and extended property verification tools. The enhancement of industry standards with formal methodologies leads to better understanding of the designed environment, eliminates ambiguity and forces a certain level of precision into the specification. An extra benefit is that we can use one of the many algebraic specification languages in order to assist with property checking/verification.