
An Interview with Steve Easterbrook

Audience feedback at the 2nd Workshop on Living with Inconsistency, as summarized by workshop chair Steve Easterbrool:
What is the ongoing problem that you are trying to solve?
The workshop is inspired by the observation that inconsistency is inevitable in the large sets of descriptions that software engineers need to deal with. Prevention (of inconsistency) is generally agreed to be impractical as it places serious limitations on how software descriptions can be accessed and modified, and restrictions on how the process of building descriptions can be distributed. Hence, the central problem posed in the workshop is how do we cope with inconsistencies in our descriptions.
Is there any problem or issue that you solved this year?
Previous workshops have tackled the general questions about the process of detecting and managing inconsistency, and we have explored how inconsistency arises and is handled in different parts of software engineering. A noticeable difference at this year’s workshop was a clear shift towards the question of reasoning in the presence of inconsistency. In particular, there is now recognition that we need tools to tell us what the consequences of different inconsistencies are, so that we can determine which inconsistencies matter and which do not. All of the papers presented this year included formal frameworks for expressing and reasoning about inconsistency, ranging from a logic for expressing consistency checking rules in XML, to work on multi-valued logics for capturing disagreements.

Daniela Damian