Over the past seven years, a group of faculty and students at Oregon have been involved in the study of requirements and specifications of complex systems, ones that involve physical, social and software subsystems. The focus of this work, all falling under what we call the Kate project, has been finding support for the specification process. Our concentration has been on two related research efforts: 1) formalizing the specification construction process, and 2) building computer-based tools based on this formalization. The outcome of these two efforts has been a specification methodology and a set of tools that support it In this paper we will 1) present the methodology and the issues it raises for formalization and automation, and 2) describe the tools that we have built and their results as they relate to the methodology and issues.