Formal specification of open standards and the case of RSS v2.0

Open standardization seems to be very popular among software developers as it makes the standard's adoption by the software engineering community easier and smoother. Formal specification methods, on the other hand, while very promising, are being adopted by protocol engineers very slowly; the industry seems to have little motivation to move into this, almost unknown, territory.In this paper the authors present the i) idea of applying formal methods (formal specification techniques) to open standards' specifications, and ii) an example of a formal specification of open standards, RSS v2.0 in particular. The authors support and provide evidence for the advantages of the open standards formal…