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C00002 00002	%china[s88,jmc]		Abstract for IBM, Japan and China, AI, knowledge and databases
C00005 00003	\smallskip\centerline{Copyright \copyright\ 1988\ by John McCarthy}
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%china[s88,jmc]		Abstract for IBM, Japan and China, AI, knowledge and databases
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\title{ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, LOGIC, DATABASES AND COMMUNICATION}

\noindent Abstract: Many of the jobs that we would like to automate
primarily involve communication among different organizations.  Doing
these jobs involves knowing about other organizations, what information
they have and want, their goals as organizations, and the requirements
for communicating with them.  Much of the study of this phenomenon
goes under the heading of the design of distributed systems.  However,
this study is often carried out under the assumption that the designer
controls all the organizations involved at least to the extent of
knowing what they will do with the information exchanged.  This assumption
is unrealistic.  We need to design systems that will work for communication
between organizations without a common boss, with disparate hardware and
which update their systems asynchronously with one another.

\noindent The present lecture concerns several aspects of this matter.
(1) What systems can know about other systems, their goals and the
information available to them.
(2) The problem of developing an open-ended Common Business Communication
Language in which systems can communicate about business topics like what
is available, prices and delivery.
(3) Describing other people's data, what the data is, how it is stored,
and how it can be accessed and modified.  It is assumed that the other
people decided how to store their data without your convenience in mind.
(4) The possibility of bridge programs that know about many database
systems and formats of data and ease communication.
\smallskip\centerline{Copyright \copyright\ 1988\ by John McCarthy}
\smallskip\noindent{This draft of china[s88,jmc]\ TEXed on \jmcdate\ at \theTime}
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