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During the past nine months, the focus has been on advanced computer based techniques to support decision aiding systems. This has been centered on the development and implementation of a prototype decision aiding information system, DAISY, which should aid in gaining experience with these types of systems. In January 1975, a team of visitors from the Navy and other contractors on the ODA project visited the University of Pennsylvania for a briefing on the overall plans for DAISY, and for a look at certain advanced techniques (e.g., Natural English Language input) which might prove useful in operational decision aiding systems.

The sense of time is implicit in almost all human activity, yet it is rarely reflected in the computer database views of these activities. This paper offers a method of dealing with time, modal storage and retrieval, and describes formal and practical realizations of the concept. The conceptual framework of Modal Data Management reflects three years of experience with the DATA (Dynamic Alerting Transaction Analysis) system, in which a time oriented DBMS has been conceived, designed and actually implemented. The paper first anchors the Modal Data Management concept in the context of the relevant research in Information Modelling and storage technologies, followed by a discussion of the architectural and functional attributes of the DATA system. The major lessons from the DATA experience are then presented, paying special emphasis to their impact on the design of future versions of the system. The concluding comments deal with specific implications of the Modal Data Management in the domains of DBMS usability and Software Engineering. (Author)

This report describes a concept of 'corporate memory' which attempts to provide information systems support to the organization as a whole. It also examines the propositions that organizations incur higher information gathering costs than individuals and higher lost opportunity costs. The corporate memory system is a logical extension to the office automation concepts being widely discussed today. A proposed design and some examples of potential utility of corporate memory systems are presented.

A demonstration of the online interactive user interface in the WAND system. Various features are demonstrated including an interactive data manipulation language, a bootstrapping HELP facility, and schema browsing commands. WAND is a plex DBMS fashioned after the CODASYL database task group (DBTG) specifications. (Author), Presented at the SIGMOD Conference, 2-4 Jun 76, Washington, D. C.

Recently, several very powerful interactive question answering systems have become available. In general, these systems permit the user to pose questions in English or some formal language and will perform searches through a data base which is structured as a set of relations. These searches may involve deductive or inferential logic ability. There are two major difficulties which inhibit the widespread use of such systems. First, these systems typically deal only with a 'small' number of relations, e. g., less than 1,000,000. The data bases which we wish to query in real life are usually much larger. Second, the creation of the relational data base itself is often quite time consuming. In this paper, the problem is discussed of taking a very large data base stored in conventional rectangular form, i.e., all data elements dealing with one entity (name, address, phone, balance, for example) which are stored contiguously, selecting a subset of interest, and reformatting it into a relational data base which can be used by a question answering system.

Several problems of importance in the design and implementation of Naval management information systems have been studied. An adaptive file system, which changes the physical organization of a data base so as to minimize the average access time in response to varying needs for records have been analyzed and simulated. A generalized interrupt processer for PL/1 has been constructed and is being used to test some new methods of integrating the modules of a large system., Prepared in cooperation with Pennsylvania Univ., Philadelphia. Wharton School of Finance and Commerce.

A study was made of the interrupt handling facilities in the proposed AADC system and associated master executive control (MEC) and programming languages. The type of interrupt generating conditions, both hardware and software, which are relevant and useful to AADC are discussed. Language constructs for interrupt processing in high level languages are made. Then, the need for synchronizing primitives such as the Dijkstra semaphores is shown. A discussion of scheduling methods for processes is presented. (Author)