This Festschrift volume, published in honor of Ugo Montanari on the occasion of his 65th birthday, contains 43 papers that examine the research areas to which he has contributed, from logic programming to software engineering, as well as his many achievements.

Ugo Montanari in a Nutshell.- Ugo Montanari in a Nutshell.- Graph Transformation.- Ugo Montanari and Graph Transformation.- Unfolding Graph Transformation Systems: Theory and Applications to Verification.- Graph-Based Design and Analysis of Dynamic Software Architectures.- Graph Transformation Units – An Overview.- Synchronous Multiparty Synchronizations and Transactions.- Transformations in Reconfigurable Place/Transition Systems.- Explicit State Model Checking for Graph Grammars.- Linear-Ordered Graph Grammars: Applications to Distributed Systems Design.- Constraint and Logic Programming.- Constraint and Logic Programming: Ugo Montanari’s Main Contributions and Introduction to the Volume Section.- Semiring-Based Soft Constraints.- Declarative Debugging of Membership Equational Logic Specifications.- SPREADSPACES: Mathematically-Intelligent Graphical Spreadsheets.- An Overview of the Ciao Multiparadigm Language and Program Development Environment and Its Design Philosophy.- AND/OR Multi-valued Decision Diagrams for Constraint Networks.- Software Engineering.- Software Engineering: Ugo Montanari’s Main Contributions and Introduction to the Section.- Modeling Business within a UML-Based Rigorous Software Development Approach.- From Domain to Requirements.- Business Process Modeling for Organizational Knowledge Management.- Event-Based Service Coordination.- Dynamically Evolvable Dependable Software: From Oxymoron to Reality.- The Temporal Logic of Rewriting: A Gentle Introduction.- A Heterogeneous Approach to UML Semantics.- Concurrency Theory.- Ugo Montanari and Concurrency Theory.- On the Synthesis of Zero-Safe Nets.- A Note on Persistent Petri Nets.- Secure Data Flow in a Calculus for Context Awareness.- On Beta-Binders Communications.- On the AsynchronousNature of the Asynchronous ?-Calculus.- StonyCam: A Formal Framework for Modeling, Analyzing and Regulating Cardiac Myocytes.- Models of Computation.- Models of Computation: A Tribute to Ugo Montanari’s Vision.- Automatic Mutual Exclusion and Atomicity Checks.- Petri Nets, Discrete Physics, and Distributed Quantum Computation.- A Category of Explicit Fusions.- What Do Semantics Matter When the Meat Is Overcooked?.- Calculating Colimits Compositionally.- Observability Concepts in Abstract Data Type Specification, 30 Years Later.- Software Verification.- Ugo Montanari and Software Verification.- History Dependent Automata for Service Compatibility.- A Type System for Client Progress in a Service-Oriented Calculus.- Session and Union Types for Object Oriented Programming.- The Pairing of Contracts and Session Types.- Specifying and Analysing SOC Applications with COWS.- Approximating Behaviors in Embedded System Design.- Friends.- Ugo Montanari and Friends.- Calculating with Automata.- Twenty Years on: Reflections on the CEDISYS Project. Combining True Concurrency with Process Algebra.- Some Theorems Concerning the Core Function.- The Seventies.- Categories, Software and Meaning.- A Roman Senator.- The Semantics of Ugo Montanari.- Abstraction for a Career in Industry: A Praise for Ugo’s 65 Years.

This Festschrift volume, pubished in honor of Ugo Montanari on the occasion of his 65th birthday, contains 43 papers, written by friends and colleagues, all leading scientists in their own right, who congregated at a celebratory symposium held on June 12, 2008, in Pisa. The volume consists of seven sections, six of which are dedicated to the main research areas to which Ugo Montanari has contributed: Graph Transformation; Constraint and Logic Programming; Software Engineering; Concurrency; Models of Computation; and Software Verification. Each of these six sections starts with an introductory paper giving an account of Ugo Montanari’s contribution to the area and describing the papers in the section. The final section consists of a number of papers giving a laudation of Ugo Montanari’s numerous achievements.

From the reviews: "This volume celebrates the wide and deep contributions that spring from Montanari’s inspiring leadership. … This book is for researchers. … The reference lists are long and well done. … This is a unique resource. Any university with people working in its areas would be wise to have a copy on its shelves." (Richard Botting, ACM Computing Reviews, October, 2008)