Objective of Kappa-P The objective of Kappa-P is to provide database management facilities for many KIPSs, for instance natural language processing systems with electronic dictionaries, proof checking systems with mathematical knowledge, and ge- netic information processing systems with molecular biological data. Kappa- P has been developed to manage large amount of complex structured data efficiently. Nested Relational Model In order to treat complex structured data efficiently, the conventional re- lational model must be extended. In Kappa-P, a nested relational model with a set constructor and hierarchical attributes can represent complex data naturally, and can avoid the unnecessary division of relations. More- over, the semantics of the model matches the knowledge representation language Quixote, which is the upper layer of the KBMS of the FGCS project. Kappa-P has charge of the database engine of this system. Term is added as a data type in order to store various types of knowledge. The character code of the PIM machine is based on 2-byte code, but the code wastes secondary memory space. In order to store a huge amount of data, data compression and index facilities have been improved. Configuration The configuration of Kappa-P corresponds to the architecture of the PIM machine, and distinguishes inter-cluster parallelism from intra-cluster par- allelism. Kappa-P consists of a collection of element DBMSs located in clusters. These element DBMSs cooperate in processing a query. The global map of relations is managed by element DBMSs Called server DBMSs. Server DBMSs manage not only the global map but also ordi- nary relations. Element DBMSs, except server DBMSs, are called local DBMSs. Interface processes are created to mediate between application programs and Kappa-P, and to receive and send messages such as queries and answers. Data Placement The placement of relations also corresponds to parallelism: inter-element DBMS placement and intra-element DBMS placement. In order to use inter-cluster parallelism, relations can be located in sev- eral element DBMSs. A simple case is the distribution of relations like - 76 -