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From: Laws@KL.SRI.COM.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Object-Oriented Programming
Message-ID: <12326542058.16.LAWS@KL.SRI.Com>
Date: Fri, 14-Aug-87 20:37:51 EDT
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Posted: Fri Aug 14 20:37:51 1987
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Those interested in programming methodology (including expert systems)
will probably enjoy reading Russell Abbott's article on "Knowledge
Abstraction" in the August issue of Communications of the ACM.  It
clarifies the role of domain knowledge in programming and suggests
that object-oriented programming may be the wave of the future.  This
supports the impression of Jeffrey Stone in the Spring issue of AI
Magazine ("The AAAI-86 Conference Exhibits: New Directions in Commercial
AI") that most of the expert system vendors have found rules too limiting
and are incorporating object-oriented features in future software.

A related, but somewhat different, "knowledge level" view is taken
by B. Chandrasekaran in his Fall 1986 IEEE Expert paper: "Generic
Tasks in Knowledge-Based Reasoning: High-Level Building Blocks for
Expert System Design."  While not incompatible with object-oriented
programming, his generic tasks are at a level between that of common
shell languages (rules, frames, nets, etc.) and the full specifics
of real-world domain knowledge.

I sense a new view of AI coalescing ...

					-- Ken
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