Overview of SWCLOS Code

We had already published many papers and documents on SWCLOS, including SWCLOS user's manual. They are delivered together with this document from SWCLOS home page or you can search and easily find them over the Internet. However, while the concept and the aim of SWCLOS is very clear, it is difficult to read and understand the program code. The reason is partly because SWCLOS requires knowledge of RDF(S) and OWL in addition to knowledge of CLOS plus the Meta-Object Protocol (MOP), and partly because many fragments of procedures in program are allocated to many classes as methods and it makes hard to seize the effective functions realized by the combination of several methods as a whole program.

The aim of this document is to support readers to read the SWCLOS program code and understand it. It is desirable that readers have knowledge on CLOS and MOP. The book by G. Kiczales, "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol" helps for lispers who are not so matured on MOP. The documents on RDF(S) and OWL from W3C and papers on SWCLOS are also prerequisite for readers.

To generate this document from program source code automatically, the document generation system by Norvig's AIMA Lisp program is borrowed and tailored by author. This is very effective to save the cost for documentation and keep the concistency of information.

This document includes followings:


Author: Seiji Koide. Copyright (c) 2008,2009 Seiji Koide. Nov. 2009