There is a need to evaluate how standard technology will support the FGCS results, 
knowing that the standard technology itself is not stable, in terms of performance, in 
terms of features (distributed OS may appear soon for example). This Is in my mind 
crucial to the future of the results of this project. 

I believe that there is a need for ICOT to show the impact of the technology on 
classical problems. Just to give an example, why not try to develop a payroll package, 
where knowledge bases and rules could play an essential role for building easy to cus-
tomise packages, where parallelism is clearly possible and interesting at the processing 
and database level, where constraints can be useful for a human resource package (eg 
for allocating people to tasks, ...) and where it is possible to enhance basic packages by 
AI: for example finding the best person qualifying for a task, based on a description of 
skills etc; this can be as sophisticated as one wants, but only as the icing on the cake. I 
am sure there other potential applications where such combinations are possible. What 
would be important would be to be able to compare development time, maintenance 
time, adaptation time, performance and costs of running systems, etc. In general I feel 
a need for more comparative work, taking into account costs which I admit may be 
difficult to do since the new hardware and software cost can hardly be compared to 
commercial one. 

The results on parallel implemetations are impressive; however there is the need to 
work on automating the mapping between programs (in KL1) and processors; if this is 
not done, it may jeopardise building the higher level languages and applications which 
need to run efficiently in most cases and to exploit well the architectures. 

There is a need to work on important issues related to the knowledge bases work, 
at least to simplify it and to address for example the problem of integrity constraints 
(which is not, as I understand it, what has been done under the constraints heading in 
QUIXOTE). I also believe that the work on constraints need more research and incor-
poration of more propagation-like techniques. I have no feeling about what's needed 
for the work on the Genome project. 

There are definitely enough results obtained and enough good and important prob-
lems waiting for an answer, that there is no doubt that a follow up of the project is 
needed. 

                                                          Hervé Gallaire - 2 June 92 

Hervé Gallaire 
GSI 
25 Boulevard de l'Amiral Bruix 
75782 Paris Cedex 16 


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