AN ARCHITECTURE FOR ASSOCIATIVE PROCESSING OF LARGE KNOWLEDGE BASES (LKBS)

This paper describes the Incomplete Relational Knowledge Representation, and its support by associative processing. Top-down design of an architecture to support the model (the Generic Relational Model), has yielded functional primitives concerned with the associative derivation of sets from type lattices (Multiple Inheritance Networks). These primitives have a general utility beyond the Knowledge Base area, which is our immediate interest. A subsystem architecture known as the Generic Associative Array Processor has been developed to support the required operations. This has been implemented in VLSI technology to provide parallel processing of associative links via a dynamically configurable connection matrix. The subsystem also provides array processing of the Boolean operations on the resultant sets.