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Next: Future plans Up: ``Dashboard" : A Knowledge-Based Previous: Design philosophy

Potential applications

Nothing restricts the use of the ``Dashboard" application to astronomy or to KTL systems. Any keyword/control system with an API could use the dashboard code, by writing a different Tcl extension and altering about 30 of the 12K lines of code in the dashboard-II application. The ``trace" mechanism could substitute for the monitor/callback mechanism, or polling could be implemented for a control system with no monitor/broadcast facility. Dashboard is a shell, in other words, which could be inhabited by applications other than KTL, just as the ``FITS keyword" database is a shell which could be inhabited by other kinds of syntactic and semantic information.



De Clarke
Wed Jul 23 15:09:14 PDT 1997