MegaLog - A platform for developing Knowledge Base Management Systems

This is an overvic~w of McgaLog a platform on which nezt generation Knowledge/Dala Base Management Systems could be built. To achieve this purpose, th.e requirements of object oriented and of deductive K/DBMSs were considered in the design of MegaLog, and feaiures to support them efliciexllu were built into it. This is indeed an assertion that there is no contradiction in the fundamental principles on which ihese two types of Ii/DBMS rest. On the contrary, there are many important elements in. common, alrd those principles that are nol common arc at the very least complcmenlary lo each other. The original contributions in the destgn and implementation of MegaLog are threefold: the commott platform approach discussed above, the techniques that make possible the persistence of programs and data for shared and concurrent usage ou a large scale, and finally but not least important the use, scale and scope to wlriclr conventional lechniques in the fields of logic programming and of data bases have been applied.