Free Blackboards and Anarchic Communities of Experts

Resumé

The natural way of structuring a large expert system is to organize it as a collection of domain experts that communicate via a blackboard. We describe a ''free'' blackboard system that is being implemented on our Xerox 1108. A survey of the wide variety of languages and logics for knowledge representation and use motivates the freedom of the blackboard organization: the blackboard must not restrict the kind of specialist domain experts that may be devised.