Rainer Joswig
Hamburg, Germany
Email: joswig@lisp.de

Book: AI Tools and Techniques, Mark Richter, 1989

Here is another one of those old Lisp- and/or AI-related books: AI Tools and Techniques, Mark Richter, 1989. Contents: Part I, OBJECT-ORIENTED AND ACCESS-ORIENTED PROGRAMMING Object-Oriented Programming: Themes and Variations Integrating Access-Oriented Programming into a Multiparadigm Environment Part II, TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES FOR ACQUIRING, REPRESENTING, AND EXPLAINING KNOWLEDGE An Evaluation of Expert System Development Tools Reasoning with Worlds and Truth Maintenance AQUINAS: A Knowledge-Acquisition Workbench Knowledge Representation in NIKL On Making Expert Systems More Like Experts Part III, SPECIALIZED TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES AI Tools for Simulation SimKit: Model-Building Simulation Toolkit Transformational Synthesis Using REFINE Part IV, BUILDING BRIDGES FROM KNOWLEDGE-BASED TO CONVENTIONAL SYSTEMS KEEConnection: A Bridge Between Databases and Knowledge Bases ABE: A Cooperative Operating System and Development Environment This book is from a time when AI was still a hot topic and many of the AI tools were written in Lisp. Lisp Machines were competing with the upcoming Unix workstations. Four big development tools for AI software were written in Lisp: S.1 (Teknowledge, Inc.), KEE (Knowledge Engineering Environment, Intellicorp, Inc.), Knowledge Craft (Carnegie Group Inc.) and ART (Automated Reasoning Tool, Inference Corporation). These tools offered support for Rules, Logic, Frames and graphical development environments. The book has also chapters on SimKit (a simulation toolkit for KEE), NIKL (an early description logic written in Lisp), REFINE (a high-level programming system written in Lisp), KEEWorlds and KEEConnection (a database interface to SQL databases for KEE). The book gives some good background information on some of the AI tools written in Lisp from the late 80s. Check out the introductions to object-oriented programming and access-oriented programming from the Lisp guys from Xerox PARC. These papers are available as PDF for download.

Links:

AI Tools and Techniques, Mark Richter, 1989

Object-Oriented Programming: Themes and Variations (PDF)

Integrating Access-Oriented Programming into a Multiparadigm Environment (PDF)

Reasoning with Worlds and Truth Maintenance (PDF)

Keywords:

AI BOOK KEE