This document contains the first deliverable of a research project on `Cross Viewpoint Consistency in Open Distributed Processing', carried out at the Computing Laboratory of the University of Kent. Open Distributed Processing (ODP) is recognised as an important area of standardisation activity. The ODP model seeks to provide a standardised architecture for building potentially global distributed systems with components from many vendors. Thus, ODP will realise the open systems ethos in the distributed systems domain. A central concept in ODP is that of a viewpoint. Distributed systems are viewed to be so complex that a process of separation of concerns must be employed when describing such systems. Viewpoints provide such a separation of concerns by presenting five distinct views of a single system; these are the enterprise viewpoint, information viewpoint, computational viewpoint, engineering viewpoint and technology viewpoint. It should be clear that in such viewpoint models it is essential that specifications in different viewpoinmts are related in order to determine whether the muyltiple specifications impose conflicting requirements. The project being reported here responds to this need by investigating how to check that multiple viewpoint specifications are in some sense ''consistent''. The objective of the project is to assess the feasibility of cross viewpoint consistency checking for specifications written in Z and LOTOS. We aim to develop prototype tools and techniques for consistency checking in and between these two specification languages. This deliverable describes the initial phase of the project which has focused on consistency checking methods for individual formalisms. It also contains a fully general framework for consistency checking. Keywords: ODP, LOTOS, Z, consistency, formal methods, distributed systems, software engineering
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