A Family of License Languages

  • Dines Bjorner | Denmark Technical University (Emeritus)

This is a methodology colloquium talk.
Classical digital rights license languages applied to the electronic “downloading”, payment and rendering (playing) of artistic works (for example music, literature readings and movies). In this talk we generalise such applications languages and we extend the concept of licensing to also cover work authorisation (work commitment and promises) in health care and in public government. The digital works for these two new application domains are patient medical records and public government documents.
Digital rights licensing for artistic works seeks to safeguard against piracy and to ensure proper payments for the rights to render these works. Health care and public government license languages seek to ensure transparent and professional (accurate and timely) health care, respectively `good governance’. Proper mathematical definition of licensing languages seeks to ensure smooth and correct computerised management of licenses.
In this talk we shall motivate and exemplify three license languages, their pragmatics, syntax and informal as well as formal semantics.

Speaker Details

Dines Bjorner was Prof. of Computing Science at The Techn. Univ. of Denmark 1. Sept. 1976 – 31 March 2007. DB was with IBM R&D 1962-1976. At IBM DB worked with Gene Amdahl, John W. Backus (ffp), E.F.Codd (Relational Databases), and at the IBM Lab., Vienna, Austria – DB worked in the small team (with Peter Lucas, Hans Bekic and Cliff Jones) R&Ding VDM, the Vienna Development Method, the first ISO standardised formal method. DB co-founded Dansk Datamatik Center 1979-1989, led many EU R&D projects including the formal spec. of a semantics for Ada, the R&D of, and compilers for CHILL and Ada, and the RAISE, Rigorous Approach to Industrial Software Engineering. 1991-1997 DB was founding and first UN Director of the Macau-based UNU-IIST, the UN University’s Intl. Inst. for SW Techn. DB has published over 100 papers, co-written or co-edited some 12 books, tutored some 120 MSc Thesis studens and some 20 PhD students. In 2006 DB published a three volume book and in 2007 DB edited (with Martin Henson) another book. For these see “Software Engineering” and “Logics of Specification Languages”. DB is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, Member of Academia Europaea (and holds the Chair of its Informatics Section), Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Dr.h.c., etc.

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