From: ono@mood.mech.tohoku.ac.jp (Noboru Ono)
Newsgroups: comp.databases,alt.sources.d,sci.materials
Subject: MOOD/P3:{Mini,Material's}OODBS, english manual
Date: 5 Oct 92 15:25:19 GMT
Followup-To: comp.databases
Distribution: comp,alt,sci
Organization: Dept. of Machine Intelligence and Systems Engineering, Fac. of
	Eng., Tohoku Univ., Sendai, Japan


This is the follow-up of my previous post on the subject to announce
that English manual(ver.1.00) of MOOD/P3 is now ready. with this
release, ftp-able from:

	~ftp at mood.mech.tohoku.ac.jp (130.34.88.61)

are:

1) MOOD/P3 executable package
2) MOOD/P3 interpreter version source program package
3) tex source files of English manual

for those who first come across MOOD/P3, the extract from the preface
of the manual is included below. we appreciate your interest and
advise on this project.

  **************************************** extract from preface.tex

MOOD, Material's Object-Oriented Database, is a research project. In
this project, we are trying to construct a material database from
which we can extract relevant informations, only and all of them
hopefully, on how the materials of interest have behaved in the
circumstances of interest. Experimental scientists and engineers, as
well as system engineers in association with them, already know that
this is not an easy task.

      Materials are different from each other in various aspects such
as chemical composition, production method and specimen preparation
procedures. The same is the case for testing conditions. The number of
these items needed to specify a data point is large. It can be near
1000, as in the case of reactor material databases.

      The problem, however, is not this number, but that the
constitution of the items can be widely different from one data to
another. Suppose, for example, an original material $M_0$ was
subjected to a sequence of treatment A followed by B, resulting in a
material $M_B$ on which a material testing was conducted. Another test
was done on a material $M_C$ which was obtained by applying treatments
A followed by C on the same original material. The fields prepared for
the recording of the details of processes B or C, are left blank in
each of these records. It is also difficult to distinguish the
material subjected to the process A-B from that subjected to B-A.

      The virtue of OODBS that a record, or an object in OODBS
terminology, can be a field value of another record relieve us from
these difficulties. That is, we may record an object which represents
the material obtained by applying A on $M_0$ as, say, $M_A$. $M_B$ is
described as the materials obtained by applying B to $M_A$ without
referring to the schema for the process C. The same is the case of
$M_C$, where the process B is not referred to. The order of processes
applied is duly expressed in the structure of recording itself. 
Further, the fact that the objects $M_B$ and $M_C$ have the object
$M_A$ in common in their description reduces the load of data input
and, more significantly, expresses that they have been produced from
the same original material.

      MOOD/P3 is an object-oriented database system (OODBS) developed
and being used in MOOD project. It works stand-alone on personal
computer, NEC/PC-9801. Partly because of this and partly because MOOD
project is still on its long way to go, it is an prototype in regard
to both its capacity and its functionality. Nevertheless, MOOD/P3 is a
complete system, equipped with basic functionalities needed to be an
OODBS and with some more advanced features crucially required to be
the platform for material database. The description of OODBS above is
only the beginning of the story, indeed. It provides us more as you
may find in this volume and also in other OODBS propositions. It is
true, however, that the rich resources of OODBS force us to make the
analysis of object domain which is somewhat different from and,
perhaps, more extensive than that needed in the use of the relational
database system. MOOD/P3 will be sufficiently useful on the stage
where a variety of prototype database designs are made and evaluated
with a limited number of data, as we are currently doing so.

      What MOOD/P3 does in essence is very simple and limited. It has
a unique user interface named the Object Editor, or OE in short. OE
does virtually all the things needed in the maintenance and the use of
database. First, it does the editing of object and stores the result. 
This is the same as what text editor does on text, but the object is
forced to conform to the syntax of legitimate MOOD object.

      A query to the database in MOOD/P3 is represented with an object
which describes user's interest. The structure of the query object is
the same as data objects, as the data "Material A exhibited B" has the
same structure to the query "What material exhibited B?". The system
provided with a query object as such searches those data objects which
are conceptually subsumed by the query object. The data objects thus
retrieved are viewed in OE, in the same way as the contents of text
file are best viewed with the editor used to make it.
     
      Further, the database schema, or the definition of classes in
OODBS, can be represented as a set of data objects of the category
"class object" by providing system-intrinsic schema with which the
definition of user classes are described. Thus, construction of
database schema and its modification are made by the editing of class
objects with OE.
     
      MOOD/P3 is equipped with the default reasoning and other
inference mechanisms which are activated during data retrieval if
appropriate. These mechanisms are considered indispensable for OODBS
to be practical as a platform of database for material data and those
of the similar nature. The rules for these inferences are
representation of knowledge in the user domain and are written as a
part of class object during its editing with OE.

      The role of OE in MOOD/P3, as seen above, is multiple and
important. MOOD/P3 is, therefore, a program very much user-interface
intensive. We feel that any OODBS application should be provided with
good user interface to manipulate classes and data objects. They are
structured objects and can be as complex as small computer programs
(imagine a tree with successive branching, terminated with several
hundreds leaves). There objects are to be handled by non-programmer
end-users upon inputting data and making query to the database;
otherwise OODBS would be a tool simply to make system programmers
happier. OE is a proposition to fulfill this requirement.
     
      Part 1 of this manual describes the basic concepts of OODBS
referring to their implementation in MOOD/P3. The functions of OE and
inference mechanisms are also introduced. Part 2 is the operation
manual, supplemented with some more technical details presented in
Part 3, such as the syntax of object, definition and evolution of
classes, inheritance, basic matching rules, the syntax and function of
inferences.

      Part 4 is the description and discussion on the sample material
database included in this package. This sample database may
demonstrate the power of MOOD/P3 in representing complex objects in
real world and in discriminating them from each other. At the same
time, it will make clear the nature of informations to be handled by
database system in the field of materials science and engineering. 
This is not the special case, since the nature is shared by the
results of experiments and observations in any field of science and
technology, such as medicine, biology, chemistry, and unenumeratably
many others.
     
      The program of MOOD/P3 is written mainly with Arity/Prolog
(Arity Corp.) and supplementally with Lattice C (Lattice, Inc.)
integrated to the Prolog part through Arity/Prolog embedded-C
environment. C-tool/98 library (Lifeboat Inc.)  and a text screen
control utility library, TSCU.LIB(PDS) are also used.
     
    - - - - - - - 

      As mentioned above, MOOD/P3 is a prototype in its functionality
and capacity. The current focus of MOOD project is mainly on UNIX
version of MOOD/P3, where various other functionalities and further
sophistications which have been only ideas so far will be implemented
and tested. But, the personal computer version will be still valuable,
because it will serve one who first touchs OODBS as a handy tool for
getting introduced to the system and accumulating some experience. 
Interest and suggestions to this program, therefore, will be
gratefully appreciated.


--

Noboru Ono                                             * $@>.Ln(J $@M[(J
Dept. of Machine Intelligence and Systems Engineering, * $@5!3#CNG=9)3X2J(J
Faculty of Engineering, Tohoku University.             * $@ElKLBg3X9)3XIt(J
Tel:++22-222-1800, Fax:++22-268-3688, E-mail:ono@mood.mech.tohoku.ac.jp
From: Bruce.Feist@f615.n109.z1.fidonet.org (Bruce Feist)
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