Dear Netter,

Here's an excerpt from the manpage about the system:

Mobal is a sophisticated system for developing operational models of
application domains. It integrates a manual knowledge acquisition and
inspection environment, a powerful inference engine, machine learning
methods for automated knowledge acquisition, and a knowledge revision
tool.

By using Mobal's knowledge acquisition environment, you can
incrementally develop a model of your domain in terms of logical facts
and rules.  You can inspect the knowledge you have entered in text or
graphics windows, augment the knowledge, or change it at any time.
The built-in inference engine can immediately execute the rules you
have entered to show you the consequences of your inputs, or answer
queries about the current knowledge.  Mobal also builds a dynamic sort
taxonomy from your inputs.  If you wish, you can use machine learning
methods to automatically discover additional rules based on the facts
that you have entered, or to form new concepts.  If there are
contradictions in the knowledge base due to incorrect rules or facts,
there is a knowledge revision tool to help you locate the problem and
fix it.



Dear Mobal User,

the file Mobal2.2.tar.Z in this directory contains all the files you
need to install Mobal 2.2.  To run Mobal, you also need OpenWindows
2.0, which you should have received from Sun along with your
Sparcstation, and HyperNeWS 1.4.  Make sure to retrieve Mobal in
binary mode, then unpack the tarfile in Mobal 2.2's desired
installation directory.  By courtesy of the Turing Institute, Glasgow
(newsdev@turing.ac.uk), HyperNeWS is now also available on this
server, in ../HyperNeWS, so if you don't have it, you can find it
there.

The file Changes-since-Mobal2.0 describes the new features of the
new release.

The file gmd-ml-publications.ps.Z is a compressed PostScript version
of a list showing MOBAL related publications from the GMD.

The User Guide has been completely reworked and extended for this
release.  A compressed PostScript version is in file
extras/userguide.ps.Z (it is also part of Mobal2.2.tar.Z, so don't
retrieve it twice).

extras/mobal.ps.Z contains a brief, two page description of what Mobal
is and what it does.

extras/Installation is a short text file that describes how to install
the system.

extras/further-domains contains additional domains not part of
the core release. From time to time we will add new domain models
and machine learning data to this directory.

Mobal can be used free of charge for academic, educational, or
non-commercial uses.  We do require, however, that you send us e-mail
(address below) so we know where Mobal is going.  This will also get
you access to MobalNews, our mailing list where we let all registered
Mobal users know about updates, bug fixes, etc.

Please do not make Mobal available to others without giving them
a copy of this file, and asking them to register with us.

Good luck, and let us know about your experiences with Mobal!
Our e-mail address is

   mobal@gmdzi.gmd.de

Ciao,

The MLT Team.

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the MLT Team
GMD (German Natl. Research Center for Computer Science)
FIT.KI (Artificial Intelligence Research Division)
Schloss Birlinghoven, D-53757 Sankt Augustin, Germany
Fax: +49/2241/14-2072  E-Mail: mobal@gmdzi.gmd.de
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