SUO: Re: CG: Negotiation Instead of Legislation
> In my keynote presentation for the Knowledge Technologies Conference,
> which will be given in Seattle on March 13th, I make those points,
> and I discuss successful implementations that have worked on major
> systems. Following are the slides for the talk:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/negotiat.htm
>
> At the end of the slides are some recommended readings for further
> background about these issues.
>
> John Sowa
Looks nice! I just have one little nit to pick, if I may: why do you
pick BinProlog as the implementation platform? Prolog has aged a bit
as a language for logical calculation, e.g., it is not higher-order
and it does not provide first-class search. BinProlog is a recent
implementation that provides multiple search engines that can be
distributed. But these abilities are not well-integrated; they just
sit beside each other. This may be fine for short-term solutions,
but I do not think it is a good basis for a fundamental, long-term
solution to your problem. There is by now a long line of research on
successors to Prolog that integrate first-class search, higher-order
programming, concurrency, and distribution in a more fundamental way.
This work has resulted in many languages that improve on Prolog in
deep ways: GHC (1985), LIFE (1988), AKL (1990), KLIC (1994). The
most recent example of this line of research is the Oz 3 language.
Oz 3 combines both logic programming and distribution. It has both
a high-quality implementation and a simple formal semantics. This
is not hype; most people who encounter Oz for the first time are
surprised to find something as nice "appear out of nowhere".
There is an article explaining Oz from the logic programming viewpoint
available at http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/PVR/tut200202.ps. This
article will appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming. There
is an open source implementation of Oz available from the Mozart
Consortium Website at http://www.mozart-oz.org.
Peter
PS: Gerard Ellis knows some of this work. He was a student intern
at the Digital Paris Research Lab in the early 1990's and worked
together with Hassan Ait-Kaci, the designer of LIFE, and myself.
--
Peter Van Roy
Département d'Ingénierie Informatique
(Department of Computing Science and Engineering)
Université catholique de Louvain
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Email: pvr@info.ucl.ac.be
Tel: (+32) (10) 47.83.74
Web: http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/cvvanroy.html