Set of clauses. Clause sets should be used to pack related clauses (e.g. facts
with the same predicate or rules with the same predicates in the head). When the
method clauses() is called to retrieve the
element of the "set" (better: collection), then the set is actually be built.
Therefore, clause sets can be descriptive containers. A typical application
is the on the fly integration of facts from relational databases.
Note that clauses (and thereby facts and rules) itself are treated as clause sets and
therefore clause sets are often invisible to the user.
Clause sets are the main entities managed by knowledge bases.
See Also:org.mandarax.kernel.KnowledgeBase See Also:org.mandarax.kernel.Rule See Also:org.mandarax.kernel.Fact author: Jens Dietrich version: 3.4 <7 March 05> since: 1.0
Get a key for indexing. The knowledge base is supposed to
contain only clauses having the same key object. This method
returns this key object. Note that this behavior is not enforced!
See Also:org.mandarax.kernel.Fact.getKey See Also:org.mandarax.kernel.Rule.getKey the key object