Conference heron::euro_swas_ai

277.0. "PrologII+,PrologIII licences announce" by AIDIVE::HIMBAUT () Fri Feb 08 1991 16:40

		ANNOUCEMENT OF EUROPEAN LICENCE FOR Digital OF 
			PROLOG II+ AND PROLOG III



1. Reasons for this Contract

1.1. Business Justification

According to market research by OVUM Ltd ,the market in Europe for PROLOG
language tools was approximately 12 M$ in 1989,and the market for industrial
software services (with solutions using PROLOG) was about 26 M$. In Japan,the
figures are about 5 times larger,and in the US two times larger than in Europe.

Since the withdrawal of VAX-Prolog, Digital has been forced to rely on 
third-party PROLOG vendors (such as QUINTUS(US), IF(Germany), Delphia (F)) 
which themselves compete with Digital for consulting and integration work.
As a result, Digital has not been able to respond to external demand for
Prolog-based solutions. The agreement with Prologia would open up for this
market in Europe, both for expert systems, as well as for natural language work
(for which PROLOG is ideally suited).

PrologII+ offers, at much lower license costs, the same capabilities as the 
much more expensive products (Quintus,etc...). Thus Digital acquires access to 
a tool which makes competitive pricing possible.

Prolog III is the result of a 8 M$ Esprit II development (Prologia, Mercedes, 
Bosch,etc..), just completed. Accessing this technology now, places Digital in 
a favorable position. Prologia has already sold 120 licenses in 1990 alone, 
mostly to the research community, proving already the viability and interest of
this system. Accessing the technology in the proposed way is also a direct 
saving to Digital because the R&D was 50 % subsidized.

Prologia is based in Marseille and the geographical proximity to VBO adds to 
the level of interaction and control kept by Digital in dealing with that 
company. 

PROLOG skills are available in-house in Digital France, Digital Germany, 
Digital Switzerland, Digital UK besides Valbonne so that the free european 
Prolog III license by itself is worth about 5 times 50 000 FRF or 250 000 FRF, and on top 
of this the free european Prolog II+ licenses (e.g. 5 times 25 000 FRF or 
125 000 FRF).

1.2.Technical justifications

The key thing is here Prolog III which essentially integrates capabilities 
found from expert systems, with those from natural language processing, with 
those from operations research etc...for scheduling, optimization, decision 
support systems, planning,etc...

Because of its solid theoretical basis,Prolog III outperforms developments at 
BULL (Charme),IBM (CLP) and elsewhere.

Prolog III is bound to take over the decision support systems area as a basic 
programming language in applications areas such as manufacturing, finance, 
transportation.

Several recent articles in the US,including influential business newsletters
such as Intelligent Software Strategies, have highlighted Prolog III as most
promising for its integration of AI with OR/DSS,and as a milestone in the future
constraint based programming languages; this is rather rare in a market 
dominated by US or Japanese developments.



2. Contract

2.1 Description

Contractors :

PrologIA				Digital Equiment Centre Technique Europe
Parc Technologique de Luminy		BP 129 Sophia-Antipolis
case 919				06560 Valbonne
13288 MARSEILLE cedex 09		FRANCE
FRANCE


The contract gives to Digital (EUROPE only) a free usage of Prolog II+ and 
Prolog III for internal development only. This means that if Digital develops 
software written in one of these languages, it can be distributed freely within
Digital EUROPE.

If Digital develops software for an external customer using PrologII+ or 
Prolog III the customer must purchase a license for the language directly to
PrologIA. A list of prices will be written in a notesfile (see 5.4) in order
to give a price estimation a a software Digital sells. 


2.2 Why Prologia ?

In addition to 1.1 and 1.2, this is a brief description of PrologIA :

	- created in 1984 with professors from GIA (see below), managed by
	Alain Colmerauer, one the Prolog's father.

	- 11 engineers and project leaders

	- 4 consultants

	- revenue growing fast

	- good industrial and university references

	- PrologIA participates in the ISO group (SC22 WG17) created in 1988 to
	standardize Prolog and is one of the three contributors to the
	international standard.

They maintain a strong link with the GIA (Groupe Intelligence Artificielle) of
the Marseille University; ie at least 20 people (professors and Phd students)
working on the evolution of the theoritical part of Prolog III.

Alain Colmerauer is the director of the GIA.


The EIS AI-IST at VBO has had a very good relationship with PrologIA for many 
years.

The group has used Prolog II+ for some years and have participated in the 
field-testing of versions of this product. Prolog III is currently in use.



3. Technical Description

3.1 Prolog II+

We present here only the main features and the diffrences with the other 
Prolog languages.

	- accepts two syntaxes (for historic and technical reasons) : Marseille
	syntax and Edinburgh syntax.

	- operators at the level of terms.

	- marked identifiers (quote).

	- mechanism which solves inequation type constraints : dif(x,y) with x
	and y possibly unbound.

	- a delay mechanism : in standard Prolog it is impossible to express
	the fact that a number x is positive if the value is not known; to solve
	this difficulty the freeze(x,P) primitive is introduced which delays the
	execution of P until x is known.

	- modules can be created, used, loaded and saved dynamically by the 
	program; the module system is based on an extension of the prolog
	identifiers which are all prefixed; in any given state of a program,
	a module is defined as being the set of rules whose access identifiers
	have the same prefix; the modules can be compiled, modified, saved, 
	deleted and reloaded.

	- a complete automatic recovery system for copy and restore spaces is 
	implemented; another technique is used to recover memory in rule space.

	- a rule editor is implemented.

	- a program debugger is implemented.

	- call-in, call-out.

	- graphic primitives soon in MOTIF.

	- shared data zones with other languages.

See documentation for further details.


3.2 Prolog III

Prolog III is a reshaped Prolog integrating at the unification level :

	- a refined manipulation of trees, including infinite trees, together
	with a specific treatment of lists.

	- a complete treatment of two-valued Boolean Algebra.

	- a numeric treament of the operations of addition, substraction, 
	multiplication by a constant and the relations <,<=,>=,>.

	- the general processing of the relation <> (different).

The concept of unification is replaced by the concept of constraint solving in
a mathematical structure, i.e a domain equipped with operations and relations,
the operations being not necessarily defined everywhere.

Prolog III has, in addition, all the features of Prolog II+ (see 3.1).



4. How to get the kit

Prolog II+ and Prolog III  are provided for INTERNAL USE in EUROPE only. For
external customers see 2.1.

Please do not pass along this kit to ANY OTHER internal users. Digital will 
be in trouble if some kits are floating outside of EUROPE. You are responsible 
FOR THE CORRECT PROTECTION OF ANY KIT YOU INSTALL.

Prolog II+ and Prolog III are available under VMS and ULTRIX.

To get the kit send a mail to  AIDIVE::HIMBAUT indicating the operating system
used. You will receive the address of the location of the kit.

The documentation will be at the same location ( Installation guide and 
reference Manual). 



5. Support

5.1 Technical Support

Any bugs should be reported to AIDIVE::HIMBAUT. See also 5.4


5.2 Marketing Support

There are some brochures which can mailed or faxed. There is also some 
presentation material and papers available. Contact the AI-IST group at VBO or
send a mail to AIDIVE::HIMBAUT.


5.3 Trainings

A basic Prolog training will be setup if there is sufficient demand.

Two Prolog III trainings will be organised during Spring 1991:

	- first level :

		+ constraint based reasoning
		+ domain scope
		+ survey of applications
		+ one application in detail
		+ marketing and business viewpoints

	- advanced level :

		+ Prolog III features
		+ Hands-on solution of many examples in various domains.


5.4 Notesfile

Any problems or topics relevant to Prolog II+ or III can be entered in 
conference YIPPEE::PROLOG. 

Any discussion and exchange of software could take place in the notesfile.

	Serge HIMBAUT
	EIC AI-IST group
	BP 129 Sophia-Antipolis
	06560 Valbonne
	FRANCE

	tel : +33.92.95.50.61
	DTN:  828-5061
	Email : AIDIVE::HIMBAUT
	loc : @VBE

The documentation on-line for PrologII+ and PorlogIII will be available next
week; we will have it first on 3 1/4 disks written on a Mac Intosh with WORDS.
The documentation will be under .ln03 and .ps formats. 

Serge