KIWIS: advanced knowledge-base environments for large database systems

The authors present an overview of the functionality and the architecture of KIWIS, a federated knowledge-base environment based on deduction in an object-oriented framework. A KIWIS environment consists of a number of participating KIWIS systems, each of which may be connected to one or more external databases. The architecture of each component system is composed of a number of layers that incrementally add power to this system. The kernel of a system consists of layers 1 through 4 and creates the `personal knowledge machine´ environment. The other layers (5 and 6) act as a `window on the world´, enriching the local system knowledge with external knowledge