Relativism and views in a conceptual data base model

The purpose of the Pingree Park Workshop was to bring together practitioners from the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Database Management (DB), and Programming Languages (PL), to discover common issues, and to explore commonalities and differences in approaches to these issues. At the risk of being superficial let me try to summarily characterize the three fields and point to where I think they may fruitfully interact. It seems to me that at its best, AI is an interdisciplinary science of cognition. It attempts to understand the bases for natural cognition, primarily by developing models of structures and processes that underlie cognition. By incorporation into interactive systems these models can be both exploited as artificially intelligent technology and explored for their adequacy in explaining natural cognition.