Reeves, Steve2008-03-192007-07-112008-03-191998-01-01Reeves, S. (1998). Specifying collaborative software: a proposal. In 1998 International Conference Software Engineering: Education & Practice: proceedings: January 26-29, 1998, Dunedin, New Zealand. (pp. 52-59). Los Alamitos, Calif.: IEEE Computer Society Press.https://hdl.handle.net/10289/45The aim of this paper is to illustrate how formal specifications for collaborative interactive systems might be written. It presents a new modelling paradigm for certain systems. It also shows how formal software engineering approaches can be useful. Specifically we choose to specify a simple collaborative editor. This example serves two purposes: it shows how clear and simple a formal specification can be and it provides a basis for making observations about the requirements for a specification language where the target is CSCW systems. The specification of the system has three parts: the semantics of the system; the syntax of the system; the semantics of the collaborative aspects of the system.application/pdfenThis document has been peer reviewed.Conference Contribution10.1109/SEEP.1998.707633