Engineering is conceived as a discipline which is to be increasingly dominated by modelling techniques which permit the construction and evaluation of a design prior to physical fabrication of its implementation. The increasingly dominant intellectual content of engineering problem solving, the business of modelling, is at bottom pure logic. Software supporting these intellectual activities will be more effective when it is built on solid logical foundations. This prospective future development may be related to the digital revolution which we are all now expecting or experiencing. The logical revolution, as yet scarcely anticipated, flows from the same underlying imperatives about the way in which information must be represented if we are to be able to manipulate it effectively.
Digitisation is a prerequisite of information being processed by computers.
What can then be done with the information by computers depends on how the information is represented. A static image represented as a bit map can be displayed but can be manipulated less effectively than a representation of the data which contains more structural information. A movie of a dynamic three dimensional experience can be represented as a sequence of bitmaps, but to permit interactive navigation more sophisticated representations are required. Ultimately we will need computers to understand the data which they manipulate and to be able to reason about the behaviour as well as the appearance of the system described. To represent a system in a manner which is adequate for the purposes of many different kinds of software which may be required to work with it, and which is open-ended in terms of the functionality which may be delivered, a logical approach will prove beneficial.