Project update

Greetings. It's been awhile since LISA's last release so I wanted to 
update everyone on events and plans. I've spent the last six months or 
so "job hopping" (by necessity rather than choice) so I've had very 
little time to devote to LISA. I'm going to try and remedy that over 
the next several weeks, however. As I see the project, LISA has two 
immediate feature needs; Queries and Truth Maintenance. Queries are 
basically finished; I need to integrate them into the main project and 
add caching support, but that isn't difficult. I haven't done any work 
on Truth Maintenance but I don't see that effort as overly burdensome 
either. Once these two features are done I want to halt further 
development (for a time) and concentrate on cleanup, especially of the 
interface.

I'm debating the future of DEFTEMPLATE. One could argue that templates 
really aren't necessary in LISA because they really don't save much vis 
a vis DEFCLASS; perhaps a bit of performance over class instances 
during inferencing. I'm leaning towards deprecating DEFTEMPLATE unless 
someone offers a compelling reason to keep it.

I'm also beginning to see LISA as less of a grand, agent development 
platform and more of a light-weight, reasonably simple inference engine 
for small to medium scale KBs. This "vision" doesn't really affect LISA 
as it is today but it will influence what I consider adding in the 
future.

As always, I welcome comments.

Cheers,

-- 
------------------------------------------
David E. Young
[email protected]
http://lisa.sourceforge.net

"Those who expect to reap the blessings of liberty
  must undergo the fatigues of supporting it."
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