Senior Project - ROCKVIEW

ROCK is a frame system that supports a semantic data model, is written in C/C++, is embeddable, and provides a number of knowledge representation capabilities. Some of the capabilities are: attribute, message, and relation slots on frames, user-defined inheritance over relations, demons, hypothetical reasoning, annotations, dynamic slot and class creation and deletion, and browsing functions for inspecting a ROCK knowledge base. ROCK's inspection facilities allow the application developer to find the slots on a frame, determine class hierarchies, find the location of inherited values, etc. ROCK is commercially available and is in use in many applications.

As knowledge base (KB) systems become large and complex, they become difficult to visualize, making discussion and presentation of them very difficult. ROCK Frame Definition files are text-based descriptions of knowledge bases. The goal of this project was to create a Frame Definition-to-POSTSCRIPT conversion utility. The utility converts class and instance hierarchies (as defined in ROCK frames) into a printable POSTSCRIPT format. Object Modeling Technique (OMT) provides a set of symbols with which the frame definition files are represented. The utility creates standard POSTSCRIPT files as output, allowing the user to control various aspects of the output, such as the various details to be printed, size of the printout, etc. The software was developed in C++ and runs in a UNIX environment.