suitability of CLOS for large KB

[mcbride@eng.sun.com (Philp McBride)]

> I recently received a reviewer's comments concerning a manuscript
> I submitted describing an application of PCL in the domain of
> molecular pathology. In these comments was the criticism "CLOS is
> NOT well suited to the development of very large knowledge
> bases." Does anyone disagree or should I accept this as
> constructive criticism?

I would not accept that as constructive criticism.  It is very
inappropriate for a reviewer at this point in the development of a new
language to make such a comment.  It can only be subjective at this
stage in the development of CLOS.

What does the reviewer mean by "not well suited?"  If by this comment
the reviewer meant that CLOS was not complex enough to handle
representing "knowledge," there are a couple of counter arguments.
CLOS with its meta-object protocol can be augmented to have some or
all of the features of most frame systems.  Even, for you "neats" out
there, to the point of being compatable with first order logic or with
your favorite non-monotonic logic.  Another approach would be to use
CLOS to implement a knowledge representation system.  This has been
shown to be quite effective (see Joshua for a Flavors example).

If, on the other hand, the reviewer meant that CLOS was not well
suited from a performance point of view.  There have been no
theoretical or computational analysis of why CLOS would perform better
or worse than other object oriented systems with very large "knowledge
bases."  And, since the meta-object protocol gives the user the
ability to change the implementation of objects, there are clearly a
lot of possibilities for performance.

-Philip




























We are just now seeing the first versions of commercial CLOS
implementations.  And given that the meta-object protocol of CLOS
allows the user to redefine the implementation of object
implementations

 since we are just now seeing a few fully
developed CLOS implementations.