Aion Corp, the Palo Alto, California company that was once IBM Corp’s knowledge engineering development until it decided it was not adequately appreciated and upped sticks to start up on its own (CI No 9), has come up with one of the first products to link a knowledge-based system to a software engineering repository. The Aion Development System CASE Integration Option enhances the capability to develop and integrate knowledge-based applications into commercial data processing environments. Aion’s offering links the Aion Development System with KnowledgeWare’s Application Development Workbench. Specifically, the Aion System for ADW generates knowledge bases from enterprise object definitions in KnowledgeWare’s ADW Encyclopaedia. This enables developers to leverage existing business models in the CASE repository, yielding higher productivity and promoting consistency between definitions in the knowledge base and CASE environments, the company claims. It also facilitates the rapid application development of business logic that drives the application, quickly validating end-user business requirements. The Aion Development System enables popular analysis tools (Entity Relationship, Process Decomposition, and Data Flow diagrams) to be used in developing classes, slots, methods, states, functions and database access methods. This is accomplished by selecting objects from the ADW Encyclopedia and mapping them to objects in the generated knowledge base. Knowledge-based systems extend and complement the CASE offering by representing logic that would be very difficult to specify using the traditional procedural languages. Knowledge-based systems, by adding the dimension of rule-based and object-oriented processing, enable developers to write reusable, logic intensive applications. For the OS/2 operating system, the product costs $2,500.
