SIDUR--a formalism for structuring knowledge bases

A new class of information intensive applications is emerging [Fuch82; Ohsu82] for which neither Artificial Intelligence (AI) nor Database technologies alone are well suited. Database systems do not provide the general inferential capabilities required for problem solving, while AI techniques have not been adapted to handle massive amounts of structured data. The work presented in this paper describes a formalism for structuring information based on a user oriented information model which unifies those two technologies to help overcome the inadequacies of each. This formalism, called SIDUR, integrates a manipulation mechanism with the representation components of the model using a declarative notation known as the sigma expression. These components can then be combined to form high-level, semantically motivated schema designs which include the specification of virtual data, the definition of transactions and maintenance of semantic integrity constraints. We argue that an information model with precisely limited (in this case non-combinatorial) inferential capabilities forms the correct level of interface between the more general deductive powers of an AI component and the back-end data storage and manipulation mechanism

Particularity in engineering data

A database to be used by electrical circuit design, test, and repair expert systems must support both structural data and inferential data about the circuit. It is well known that engineering databases must support dynamic schema (re)definition of the structural data and entity-based access to it. We analyze this requirement and show that the underlying principle is one of particularity, applied to the operations of definition and access. We· then examine three types of inferential data for engineering expert system databases and show that the use of this inferential data exhibits a close parallel that of the structural data. Thus, the concepts of particularity of definition and particularity of access carry over to the inferential data. We conclude that these are the underlying phenomena which motivate the choice of an an object-oriented data model as the appropriate framework for engineering expert system databases

Implementing a semantic data model

OSIRIS is an integrated information architecture which was developed at Oregon State University. SIDUR is the data model upon which the semantic level is based. The semantic level is the mediating level between user's information needs and the stored data. The advantages of providing a semantic database environment include flexibility and independence in data access and schema changes and increased representational power. The purpose of this paper is to describe the prototype implementation of SIDUR in Franz Lisp on a VAX®-11/750. This implementation maps semantic-level database operations into a descriptive formalism, called the BAGAL query language, based solely on present data which is amenable to optimization

The Organization Of Halakhic Knowledge In Early Modern Europe: The Transformation Of A Scholarly Culture

ABSTRACT THE ORGANIZATION OF HALAKHIC KNOWLEDGE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF A SCHOLARLY CULTURE Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg David B. Ruderman Far from being abstract and immaterial, knowledge is impacted in myriad ways by non-intellectual factors, such as technology, organization, culture, and erudite practices. The scholarship of halakha, Jewish religious law, is a millennia-long tradition that was shaped by historical changes in its particular contexts. In sixteenth-century Europe specifically, historical circumstances — the advent of print, the dislocation of the Jewish communities of Ashkenaz (the German lands) reconstructed in Eastern Europe, and the shift to systematic organizational paradigms introduced by newly dominant works — led to a complete reordering of halakha. Drawing upon methods from the history of knowledge, social and cultural history, book history, media studies, and studies of knowledge-organization, this dissertation shows that the changes taking place in Europe between the 1470s and the 1570s influenced a profound transformation of the halakhic system. These changes in technology, organization, and community, fundamentally transformed Jewish law, which became more ordered and therefore more easily accessible, transmissible and applicable than its predecessor. To argue this, the dissertation’s first two units examine the shift from personal manuscript collections to printed books, from heterogeneous compilations to hyper-structured codifications, and from a panoply of localized customs to unified, universalized, Jewish law. The third unit studies the evolution of one form of halakhic writing – the responsum, epistolary exchanges about legal problems – to examine how the abovementioned changes shaped halakhic texts and their structure. An analysis of responsa as they evolve from letters, to documents in the rabbinic archive, to published works, displays the scholarly practices and forms of logic specific to each one of these media against the backdrop of the larger shifts in the history of knowledge. As a whole, this study shows that, in the sixteenth century, halakhic culture transformed from a flexible, heterogeneous, and personal universe to an increasingly stable, homogenous, and generalized legal system that henceforth shaped Jewish legal study and adjudication