Framework for parallelism in frame-based reasoning
Henry K. Wang, Rui J. P. deFigueiredo · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 1987
This paper discusses issues of parallelism within frame-based reasoning systems. This effort was motivated by the author's recent work on intelligent signal processing and visual-pattern recognition. Although rule-based systems prevail as knowledge engineering tools, frame-based systems are chosen because they provide a sound knowledge-representation scheme (including declarative and procedural knowledge) and a powerful (distributed) inference engine. A frame-based system developed at Rice University and NASA/JSC called WenLy was observed which is composed Wen, representing declarative knowledge, and Ly, representing procedural knowledge and taking charge of inference. Then two approaches are examined to achieve parallelism within that system. One is called the programming approach in which the frames are implemented on a parallel Lisp language. The order is called the architectural approach which supports MIMD computers with uniformed memory space. It is obvious that the list structure is a bottleneck to parallelism; on the other hand, it is crucial to frame-based reasoning due to its flexibility and uniformity. The authors feel they should sacrifice the degree of parallelism in exchange for a reasoning mechanism and knowledge structure that are closer to those of the human being.