Data and knowledge bases as integral parts of a distributed object infrastructure

Abstract

Atlas is a prototype of an object infrastructure. It is designed to support hundreds of millions of objects, distributed in a heterogeneous wide area network of thousands or millions of computers. Atlas is implemented mainly as a vehicle for experimenting with distributed office and information systems. Atlas supported much finer-granularity objects than traditional client/server networking models. Atlas provides location-transparent method invocation and dynamic creation, deletion, and migration of persistent and non-persistent objects. Iris is an object-oriented database management system, supporting OSQL as its main implementation language. KBMS1 is a knowledge-base management system supporting kbProlog as its implementation language. Both these databases have been integrated with Atlas. The purpose of the integration is to demonstrate that object-oriented technology is appropriate for integration of heterogeneous sources of information and information processing facilities. Atlas objects can be implemented in OSQL and reside in Iris or implemented in kbProlog and reside in KBMS1. Atlas objects can also be implemented in traditional programming language such as C. Objects implemented in any of the two databases or in traditional programming languages can communicate uniformly with each other. >