Integrating multiple paradigms within the blackboard framework

The complexity and diversity of real world applications have forced researchers in the AI field to focus more on the integration of diverse knowledge representation and reasoning techniques for solving challenging, real world problems. Our development environment, BEST (Blackboard based Expert Systems Toolkit), is aimed to provide the ability to produce large scale, evolvable, heterogeneous intelligent systems. BEST incorporates the best of multiple programming paradigms in order to avoid restricting users to a single way of expressing either knowledge or data. It combines rule based programming, object oriented programming, logic programming, procedural programming and blackboard modelling in a single architecture for knowledge engineering, so that the user can tailor a style of programming to his application, using any or arbitrary combinations of methods to provide a complete solution. The deep integration of all these techniques yields a toolkit more effective even for a specific single application than any technique in isolation or collections of multiple techniques less fully integrated. Within the basic, knowledge based programming paradigm, BEST offers a multiparadigm language for representing complex knowledge, including incomplete and uncertain knowledge. Its problem solving facilities include truth maintenance, inheritance over arbitrary relations, temporal and hypothetical reasoning, opportunistic control, automatic partitioning and scheduling and both blackboard and distributed problem solving paradigms.