Declarative Systems & Software Engineering Newsletter

Issue 13 - 6th February 1995

Editor - Hugh Glaser

Editorial

I'm away Tuesday (INRIA) and Wednesday.

Any reports of your visits or visitors gratefully received.

Today's Seminar

The DSSE talk on Monday the 6th February at 13:00 will be given by M. A. Pasha.
Logic Programming Environment for Hypermedia Information Management

Abstract

A set of open architecture, logic programming based, knowledge based system (kbs) tools for information management has been developed. By doing this we aim to: overcome a limitation of logic programming by providing loose coupling to conventional language applications; provide domain independent kbs tools to manage the information stored in hypermedia systems. The potential of the new system is tested in a legal domain, through a prototyped system using leaflets about the British Nationality Act. The implementation of a bi-directional communication channel between the kbs and hypermedia is described. The presence of kbs tools allows non-typical styles of presenting information in hypermedia and makes that information more applicable and more understandable. In particular tools are developed for knowledge based information retrieval and dynamic link generation, offering a basis for solving disorientation problems in hypermedia. In the reverse direction the communication channel can increase the behavioural expressiveness of a kbs.

Trips - Hugh Glaser

Two trips with Pieter last week.

Bristol on Wednesday. We visited Henk Muller (an ex-student of Pieter's) at PACT. An interesting place. I knew little about it, so was surprised to bump into David May and other INMOS people while waiting to move my car. They have an interesting system. The cars are parked sequentially round the house towards the back (LIFO), and when someone who got there early wants to get out, they get the people parked after them to shift there cars. It's a bit like that Butterflies programme. It does have a positive sociological effect, but I imagine it would get rather tedious. On Wednesday someone came to collect a hire car from the back, so it was probably rather extreme.

Henk is working on a virtual shared memory system called the DDM (Data Diffusion Machine) for David Warren, who we then saw at Pieter's seminar (on using Logic Programming to develop better Functional Programs) in the afternoon. We had interesting discussions afterwards with David on the Pseudoknot and Anticodon problems, among other things. Dinner was the Balti House, bloody good value.

Imperial on Thursday. I was chauffeur for Pieter again as he gave another rendition of the Bristol seminar to the ALA group. Afterwards we had a round table with a number of the group. Dinner was Memories, twice the price of the Balti.

Copy deadline: 5pm Friday for Monday's newsletter, but send the articles any time.

Hugh Glaser
Declarative Systems & Software Engineering Group
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton