Flexible Pattern Management Within PSYCHO

Patterns are concise, but rich in semantic, representation of data. The approaches proposed in the literature and by commercial systems for pattern management usually deal with few types of knowledge artifacts and mainly concern pattern extraction issues. Little effort has been posed in designing an overall framework dedicated to the management of different types of patterns, possibly user-defined, in an homogeneous way. PSYCHO (Pattern based SYstem arCHitecture prOtotype) is a recently developed tool, built on top of Oracle technologies, for generating, representing, and manipulating heterogeneous patterns, possibly user-defined. The aim of this paper is to present the PSYCHO system, by discussing the underlying theory, the reference architecture, and providing concrete examples of its usage.