A question and a note on running LOOM with SBCL

The question:  Is there any way to associate meta-information with
concepts?  That is, information that is relevant to the concept qua
concept, rather than to the members of the concept?  I suspect that this
is probably addressed somewhere, but it's beyond what is in the scope of
a tutorial, and I just need a gentle nudge to send me in the right
direction in the HTML documentation, the older manual, or the release notes.

Related to this, is it appropriate to make relations and concepts be the
values of roles?  Or would it be more appropriate to use the names, and
leave the mapping to LOOM entities outside LOOM?  I had assumed the
latter, but as I look inside the implementation of LOOM, it seems like
LOOM entities are used in relations.

The comment -- I was caught without my ACL license one day, and spent a
few hours  getting LOOM partly working on SBCL.  It was a little messy,
because SBCL puts all the CLOS functions in COMMON-LISP and all the MOP
functions in SB-MOP, and these all seem to be in CLOS:: in LOOM.  I
*think* I have that resolved.  LOOM seems to expect that any CL
implementation that has CLOS will have :clos on the *features*, but SBCL
is so firmly ANSI that it doesn't even consider the possibility of NOT
having CLOS.  I just stuffed :clos on the *features* for SBCL; I hope
that's appropriate.  Another issue is that SBCL is ferociously strict
about the ANSI standard, whereas ACL, at least, is very lax on allowing
CLtL1 constructs (exports at top level, etc.).  SBCL's MOP is a little
different, too.  I note, for example, that access to fields of
STANDARD-METHOD must be done functionally, and cannot be done by
SLOT-VALUE (the slots are given names that foil access).

If anyone's interested, I could probably extract a comprehensive patch
from our SVN repository.  I still have one error in loading the coda.
-- 
Robert P. Goldman
Senior Scientist
Smart Information Flow Technologies (d/b/a SIFT, LLC)

211 N. First St., Suite 300
Minneapolis, MN 55401

Voice:	(612) 384-3454
Email:    [email protected]
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