marcel@saturn.ADS.COM (Marcel Schoppers) (01/14/90)
Can anyone put me in touch with the people who built the BLOBS blackboard? They are/were connected with Cambridge Consultants, of Cambridge, England. Some names are Roberto Zanconato, I.J. Dickinson, and S. Middleton. I want to ask them a few questions about the capabilities provided by their blackboard, with a view to using and/or extending their software. For the sake of rapid turnaround, here is what I'm looking for -- other blackboards that get close are also of interest. My primary objectives are concurrency and the associated control primitives; support for symbolic reasoning and pattern matching; asynchronous undirected communication (or data driven invocation); hierarchical grouping of tasks (or nesting of blackboards); absence of a serializing metalevel; and availability of source code or software support. The source code or software support is absolutely essential; the rest we will consider building if they're not already present. - are symbolic reasoning, pattern matching, and object-oriented programming built-in? - can any number of tasks run (pseudo)concurrently? - do tasks communicate asynchronously (i.e. no waiting by the sending task), and is CPU time for the response to a message charged to the receiving task (i.e. messages are not just procedure calls)? - can tasks communicate "undirectedly", i.e. by posting some data that is then automatically routed to every task that is "interested" in that data? - are there facilities for unconditionally suspending and resuming tasks? - can tasks be interrupted and told to do something else by high-priority events/messages? - is it possible to set up "group tasks", i.e. hierarchical group of tasks that still run (pseudo)concurrently, but can be addressed as a unit (with suspend/resume messages)? - can data be local to a "group task" and global to each of the tasks in the group? - is there no centralized scheduler (i.e. metalevel control level) that has to be run whenever any task becomes ready to run? - is it supported software, or is source code available, and what languages & machines does it run on? marcel@ads.com