From: ono@mood.mech.tohoku.ac.jp (Noboru Ono)
Newsgroups: comp.databases,alt.sources.d,sci.materials
Subject: MOOD4-PC: {Material's,Miniature}OODbs - MOOD progress
Date: 22 Dec 1992 13:11:39 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Machine Intelligence and Systems Engineering, Fac. Eng.,
	Tohoku Univ., Sendai 980 Japan
Distribution: comp,alt,sci
NNTP-Posting-Host: mood.mech.tohoku.ac.jp

this is to announce that

     MOOD4-PC: {Material's, Miniature} Object-Oriented Database
               system program for IBM/NEC-PC

has been made ftp'able from

     mood.mech.tohoku.ac.jp (130.34.88.61)

    we will appreciate your continuing interest on our project. the
following is its release note:

   %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

 MOOD4-PC ver.1.00, preliminary release-note
 DEC 24, 1992

 Merry Christmas, by the way.
 ====================================================================

 MOOD4-PC ver.1.00:
 Material's/Miniature Object-Oriented Database Prototype for
 NEC/IBM-PC,

is an object-oriented database system program. our last program
MOOD/P3-PC was an approximate copy of MOOD/P3. it was so made in the
hope that many poeple, who can not run the program exclusively for
NEC/PC-9801, would feel the MOOD. although we have found not least bugs in
MOOD/P3-PC, we have dicided to develope it further, rather than to fix
up all those bugs within the functionalities attached to it. let us,
then, enumerate the new features of the present release, which is
newly named as MOOD4-PC. we think the program deserves this name.

   1) support of homonym and synonym.
      different classes with the same name are distiguished by their
superclasses, synonyms, and their slots. this saves us from the
unnatural naming of classes otherwise necessary in order to put
everything a unique name through out the database. the problem of
system reserved words has also been solved.

   2) summary class
      we have invented a summary class which holds a table of data
points which have been obtained a series of experiments. this saves
the load of inputting data and storage space. also this form of
recording conserves the implication embedded in the summarized data
such as an interesting correlation between a experimental parameter
and result.  the summary class object, yet, matches the query made
direct to the description of the experiment.

   3) summarizing
      for a set of data objects which matched a query, we can invoke a
"summarize" session in which we can edit a template object and execute
the session. with this, we can extract and tabulate any parameters
embedded in the individual retrieved objects. the obtained result can
be written out to a file for the processing with other program, such
as spread sheet. this functinality is a counterpart of query language
such as SELECT-FROM-WHERE and better than this at least in some way:
SELECT part, FROM part, and WHERE part are all editable in the
summarize session. you can repeat edit/execute until you get
satisfactory results.

   in implementing these, the user-interface has been subjected to
some change. we are, therefore, to prepare documents which describe
these new features and operation of MOOD4. the basic functionalities,
however, are inherited from MOOD/P3 and MOOD/P3-PC so that the manuals
for them in ../doc will still be mostly valid. for the time being, the
manuals, nemu display and some imagination will help you to enjoy (or
struggle with) this program.

     as same as the previous MOOD/P3-PC, this release is made in the
form of source program files to be consulted and run on Arity/Prolog
interpreter. the program is supposed to be portable among NEC/PC-9801,
its clones/IBM-PC and its clones with MS-DOS and Arity/Prolog
Interpreter. We could have tested this on:

   1) NEC/PCs with MS-DOS 3.3
   2) a nameless IBM-PC clone machine with MS-DOS/V, both in
Japanese and English modes. ANSI.SYS must be included in the
configuration.

     We hope you will enjoy this program. mails telling bugs,
inconveniences, objections will be appreciated.


--

Noboru Ono                                             
Dept. of Machine Intelligence and Systems Engineering, 
Faculty of Engineering, Tohoku University.            
Tel:++22-222-1800, Fax:++22-268-3688, E-mail:ono@mood.mech.tohoku.ac.jp