Special Issue of

Information & Computation

on Structural Operational Semantics

Information & Computation 207(2)

Aim: Structural operational semantics (SOS) provides a framework for giving operational semantics to programming and specification languages. A growing number of programming languages from commercial and academic spheres have been given usable semantic descriptions by means of structural operational semantics. Because of its intuitive appeal and flexibility, structural operational semantics has found considerable application in the study of the semantics of concurrent processes. Moreover, it is becoming a viable alternative to denotational semantics in the static analysis of programs, and in proving compiler correctness.

Recently, structural operational semantics has been successfully applied as a formal tool to establish results that hold for classes of process description languages. This has allowed for the generalisation of well-known results in the field of process algebra, and for the development of a meta-theory for process calculi based on the realization that many of the results in this field only depend upon general semantic properties of language constructs.

This special issue aims at documenting state-of-the-art research, new developments and directions for future investigation in the field of structural operational semantics. It is an outgrowth of the series of SOS workshops, which started in 2004, and contains full versions of several papers presented at SOS 2004, 2006 and 2007. However, papers that were not presented at these workshops were equally welcome, and all submissions have been refereed and subjected to the same quality criteria, meeting the standards of Information and Computation. Eleven papers have been selected out of a total of seventeen submissions. This issue has been edited by Rob van Glabbeek & Peter Mosses.

The accepted papers are available here.


Rob van Glabbeek
NICTA, Sydney, Australia
Peter D. Mosses
Swansea University, UK