Knowledge Interchange Format

Abstract: We address why, and especially how, to represent business rules in e-commerce contracts. By contracts, we mean descriptions of goods and services offered or sought, including ancillary agreements detailing terms of a deal. We observe that rules are useful in contracts to represent conditional relationships, e.g., in terms & conditions, service provisions, and surrounding business processes, and we illustrate this point with several examples. We analyze requirements (desiderata) for representing such rules in contracts. The requirements include: declarative semantics so as to enable shared understanding and interoperability; prioritized conflict handling so as to enable modular updating/revision; ease of parsing; integration into WWW-world software engineering; direct executability; and computational tractability. We give a representational approach that consists of two novel aspects. First, we give a new fundamental knowledge representation formalism: a generalized version of Courteous Logic Programs (CLP), which expressively extends declarative ordinary logic programs (OLP) to include prioritized conflict handling, thus enabling modularity in specifying and revising rule-sets. Our approach to implementing CLP is a courteous compiler that transCopyright ACM. To appear: Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC99), to be held Denver, Colorado, USA, Nov. 3–5, 1999. Edited by Michael P. Wellman. New York, NY: ACM Press, 1999. http://www.ibm.com/iac/ec99/ or http://www.acm.org. forms any CLP into a semantically equivalent OLP with moderate, tractable computational overhead. Second, we give a new XML encoding of CLP, called Business Rules Markup Language (BRML), suitable for interchange between heterogeneous commercial rule languages. BRML can also express a broad subset of ANSI-draft Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) which overlaps with CLP. Our new approach, unlike previous approaches, provides not only declarative semantics but also prioritized conflict handling, ease of parsing, and integration into WWW-world software engineering. We argue that this new approach meets the overall requirements to a greater extent than any of the previous approaches, including than KIF, the leading previous declarative approach. We have implemented both aspects of our approach; a free alpha prototype called CommonRules was released on the Web in July of 1999, at http://alphaworks.ibm.com. An extended version of this paper will be available as a forthcoming IBM Research Report (at http://www.research.ibm.com).

Abstract: Innovative query interfaces to knowledge and database systems must go beyond simply returning the requested information. They must be capable of producing intentional answers when a description improves the understanding of an answer [Mot94], producing conditional answers when no one answer matches the conditions of a query, and using ontological information in processing a query. They should be able to call upon stand-alone reasoning modules that are most suitable for a given query. When answering a question involves reasoning beyond a simple lookup, the system must be able to explain the answer to the user. We are building a question answering system with these objectives. The heart of the system is a knowledge base (KB) and a collection of reasoning methods. The KB is being constructed by a combination of manual and semiautomatic methods. The reasoning methods include conventional database query processing, frame-based reasoning, and full first-order theorem proving. The performance of this system will be tested on the Crisis Management Benchmark (CMB), which defines a collection of queries of interest to a crisis analyst. We begin the paper by a description of the CMB. We describe the architecture of our system and then sketch some design ideas for two of its components.

Abstract: In this survey paper we summarize the requirements for rule interchange languages for applications in the legal domain and use these requirements to evaluate RuleML, SBVR, SWRL and RIF. We also present the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), a new rule interchange format developed specifically for applications in the legal domain.

Abstract: We give a precise semantics for a proposed revised version of the Knowledge Interchange Format. We show that quantification over relations is possible in a first-order logic, but sequence variables take the language beyond first-order.