GBB: A Generic Blackboard Development System

Engineering

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 5

Knowledge Representation

This paper describes a generic blackboard development system (GBB) that unifies many characteristics of the blackboard systems constructed to date. The goal of GBB is to provide flexibility, ease of implementation, and efficient execution of the resulting application system. Efficient insertion/retrieval of blackboard objects is achieved using a language for specifying the detailed structure of the blackboard as well as how that structure is to be implemented for a specific application. These specifications are used to generate a blackboard database kernel tailored to the application. GBB consists of two distinct subsystems: a blackboard database development subsystem and a control shell. This paper focuses on the database support and pattern matching capabilities of GBB, and presents the concepts and functionality used in providing an efficient blackboard database development subsystem.