The Leonardo Project on Software Systems Architecture
Welcome to the Leonardo Project Website
Leonardo is a software project and an experimental software system that integrates capabilities that are usually found in several different software systems:
- in the operating system
- in the programming language and programming environment
- in a database system
- in a web server
- in an intelligent agent system
- in a text formatting system
and others more. These systems can jointly be called the
Main Software Base
of a conventional computer for personal use. We argue that the overall structure of a main software base that consists of these separate parts is unnecessarily complex, and we propose that it shall be possible to obtain a much more concise, efficient, and user-friendly design for the main software base by integrating capabilities in a new way. The Leonardo software system is an exploratory system whose purpose is to test and (hopefully) to validate this hypothesis.
This overriding goal for the project addresses computer software in general. However, there is one particular area where the new design for the Main Software Base is of particular interest, namely, as a platform for knowledgebased systems in Artificial Intelligence. Several aspects of the design are directly useful for such systems. Conversely, one effect of adopting the new design as a base for general computation is that a number of A.I. techniques are obtained for free since they have been incorporated into the design.
The items in the left-side menu provide links to more information about these different aspects of the Leonardo project.
Posted on 2011-03-25 as part of the LEONARDO website.