The intelligent system server: delivering AI to complex systems

The authors describe work on the design of an intelligent system server, a distributed architecture for delivering knowledge representation and reasoning services to applications. This work is based on two simple ideas. The first is that knowledge bases are like databases and their services should be provided in a similar manner-in a client-server relationship. The second idea is that a convenient and efficient interface between the AI (artificial intelligence) system and conventional database management systems is a necessity. The need arises out of the fact that many of the applications that need AI services use conventional database management systems both to store much of the information used by the application and to communicate between the various components making up the application. The authors outline the ideas underlying the intelligent system server, discuss some of the design issues, and briefly describe the current approach