Dear Jan,
At 09:38 19.06.98 -0400, you wrote:
>Thomas,
>
>In this regard and acknowledging the limitations of RDBMS, I wonder if
>you have considered incorporating a logic programming assistant within your
>Atlas-TI framework, such as a Prolog engine? This might improve modeling
>capabilities. Admittedly, it would demand additional learning on the part
>of users, but having a solid means of doing inference within specific
>models would be a powerful tool.
Although I would second the notion of Prolog based inference being more
appropriate for questions of "qualitative" nature than pure set based data
base operations, I would hesitate to offer this as "the" alternative. From
my opinion, there are some severe fallacies based on the nature of the
resolution strategies and which make the application of Prolog logic on QDA
somehow problematic. I (and certainly others as well) would be interested in
the specific uses that you make from Prolog interpreters for QDA.
By the way, the program AQUAD makes use of Prolog for specific calculations.
And ATLAS.ti, although not equipped with a Prolog inference engine, lets you
create output in a specific Prolog notation (Atlas Prolog Notation APN) for
further processing with separate inference engines. Thus, you can visually
create semantic networks on screen and then create Prolog code on the fly.
Just have a look at an ATLAS.ti project's ("Hermeneutic Units") storage
representation (*.HPR files). This feature was included to support the work
of "knowledge engineers" which has a lot in common with QDA procedures (even
IBM tested the feasibility of Grounded Theory for knowledge elicitation -
many years ago).
- Thomas
>
>I use Beta Prolog pretty heavily in my work. There are a large assortment
>of these implementations available from the 'Net, freeware, shareware, and
>commercial where, naturally, the commercial ones tend to deal with large
>sets of rules more gracefully. For more information, check out
>
>[snip]
>
>Ciao,
>
> -jt
>________________________________________
> Jan Theodore Galkowski,
> Database Reporting Developer-Analyst,
> Cornell Information Technologies
> [log in to unmask], 607-255-5486
>****************************************
> Cornell University
> 120 Maple Ave, Room 132
> Ithaca, NY 14853-2801
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> Also 500-446-2770, or
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___________________________________________________________________
Dipl.-Psych. Dipl.-Inform. Thomas Muhr
Scientific Software Development - Internet: http://www.atlasti.de
e-mail: [log in to unmask] TEL [+49 30] 861 14 15 FAX 864 20 380
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