Comorphisms of structured institutions

• We advance a concept of translation between logics of structured specifications.
• The category coStrucIns provides foundations for heterogeneous specification.
• We investigate properties of institution comorphisms in the structured setting.

In this paper we formalise the intuition of encoding an institution of structured specifications into another one by extending the concept of institution comorphism to the abstract framework of structured institutions. This allows us to define a category of comorphisms of structured institutions, and supports in this way the development of heterogeneous specification languages in which the actual structuring mechanisms may vary, in addition to the base logical systems. We consider a number of properties with practical relevance for the comorphisms between base institutions and discuss their implications in the structured setting.