Three decades of institution theory (abstract)

30 years have passed since the introduction by Joseph Goguen and Rod Burstall of the concept of ‘institution’ (in [14] under the name ‘language). Since then institution theory has gradually developed from a simple and strikingly elegant general category theoretic formulation of the informal notion of logical system into an important trend of what is now called ‘universal logic’, with substantial applications and implications in both logic and computing science. The aim of this presentation is to guide the reader through the development of institution theory from its seminal paper, included in this anthology, to its current status. We will recall important moments in this process, and discuss the most significant contributions of institution theory. Due to the rather big size of institution theory literature and also due to incompleteness in my knowledge, the omission of important works from this survey and from its references is inevitable. I apologize for all such omissions.