DB Ideas for KBMS

Abstract

Mylopoulos was discussing what a KBMS is. However, there is a difference between knowing what something is and defining it rigorously. You may know what something is before you define it but you tend to postpone the definition because you don’t want to make a final decision. Everybody by now has an idea of what a KBMS is. I suggest, instead, that we define what we should expect to find inside a KBMS. Later on, at some point, we will clarify a number of issues and then we will be able to give a much better definition. I can give an analogy. If you define a vehicle for transportation too early, then you may well make a big mistake. If you restrict it to a car or a train paradigm you may miss the airplane paradigm. Trains had many problems as a business because the train people didn’t realize early enough that they were not in the train business but in the transportation business. So we don’t want the same thing to happen to us. We don’t really want to take a very strict definition of what knowledge is, of what a KBMS is, and later on find out that there are many paradigms that just don’t fit our definition.