Blackboard-based extensions in Prolog

Abstract

This paper presents the embedding of blackboard communication primitives in Prolog. Blackboard communication is a simple but powerful form of communication that is based upon the availability of a global data structure that can be accessed by any process in a controlled way. This results in a parallel language that exploits coarse-grained application parallelism and that is related to the Linda framework. This paper contains a description of the blackboard communication primitives at the language and at the implementation level, and it is illustrated with several programming examples.