Prospectus of the KLIC Association

	       			Representative Proposers
  						Kazuhiro Fuchi
						Shunichi Uchida
						Takashi Chikayama

Ever-more intelligent computers are required as human activities progress, and 
greater functions and efficiency are needed for symbol processing, which is an 
important base in knowledge processing. The popularization of parallel 
computers and computer networks has enabled more functional, efficient symbol 
processing systems to be constructed. Thus, an advanced programming language 
with which it is easy to describe knowledge efficiently is needed.

The KL1 concurrent and parallel logic programming language meets these 
requirements. It was designed in the Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) 
project conducted by the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology 
(ICOT). Later, KLIC, which is a language processor of KL1 for general-purpose 
machines, was developed in the FGCS Follow-on project, and was released as 
free software. As knowledge processing has become increasingly important, KL1 
and KLIC have spread steadily throughout the research community, and their 
importance in future research in programming languages and various application 
areas is undisputed.

To ensure the smooth development of KL1 and KLIC, we need a central 
organization to enable researchers, engineers, and users to communicate with 
each other, and to gather together the experience and research results in 
order to facilitate continual improvement, maintenance, and diffusion. After 
ICOT had been dissolved, AITEC at the Japan Information Processing 
Development Center (JIPDEC) took over the work of disseminating FGCS 
technology, and played a central role in the research and usage of KL1 and 
KLIC. Hereafter, however, AITEC will limit its activities to distributing 
ICOT Free Software and technical documents related to FGCS projects.

Therefore, we propose setting up the KLIC Association as the core of the KLIC 
research and usage community and to promote the technology. The association 
will improve, maintain, and distribute the KLIC language processor by mutual 
cooperation among the members of the association. It will also organize 
workshops for technical exchanges on the language, the processor, 
applications, etc. and seminars for training new KLIC users. We take this 
opportunity to welcome research engineers and users who are interested in the 
KL1 programming language and KLIC language processor to participate in the 
association.