Extending an Advanced Logic Programming Environment by an Object-Oriented User Interface Management System

Abstract

Visualization and manipulation of knowledge is of great importance for any knowledge based system. Window based user interface management systems (UIMS) allow building flexible and easy to use interactive graphical user interfaces. There is a need to integrate such UIMS into knowledge base programming environments. This paper addresses the integration of UIMS into the logic programming environment PROTOS-L. Our approach provides a small set of built-in predicates that defines an easy to use object-oriented interface to UIMS within the logic programming language. This interface is realized by the PROTOS-L window manager and presented by a simple text editor in this paper. Its implementation is based on a multiple process concept with asynchronous communication in order to cope with long lasting inference processes. The prototype of the PROTOS-L window manager is implemented on top of the standard user interface toolkit OSF/Motif.