Experimental classification facilities for Smalltalk

Abstract

There have been a number of attempts to blend object-oriented programming languages with techniques commonly employed for knowledge representation in artificial intelligence. In the main, such exercises have entailed the incorporation of rule-based programming ideas into object-oriented languages, or the imposition of object-oriented constructs on logical programming notations. In this report, we describe a system with a slightly different approach to the problem, which augments an object-oriented language with term classification capabilities like those found in KL-One and its successors. We hope to establish that this approach results in a more natural and efficacious integration of conventional object-oriented programming and knowledge representation than has been attained up to now.