Limits and Colimits in Some Categories of Institutions

: This paper presents a number of concepts of a mapping between logical systems modelled as institutions, discusses their mutual merits and demerits, and sketches their role in the process of system specification and development. Some simple properties of the resulting categories of institutions are given. 1 Introduction We have to live with a multitude of logical systems used in various approaches to software specification and development. The proliferation of logical systems in the area is not just researchers' fancy, but results from the very practical needs to capture various aspects of software systems and to cater for various programming paradigms. Each of them leads to a different notion of a semantic model capturing the semantic essence of the adopted view of software systems. For instance, standard (many-sorted) algebras [BL70], [GTW78] provide a satisfactory framework for modelling data types where all operations always yield well-defined results. However, if general recursi..