DIPLOMAT: Compiling Prioritized Default Rules into Ordinary Logic Programs, for E-Commerce Applications

摘要

Rules promise to be widely useful in Internet electronic commerce. Declarative prioritized default rule knowledge representations offer the advantage of handling conflicts that arise in updating rule sets, but have as yet had little practical deployment. DIPLOMAT is a Jav library that embodies a new approach to the implementation of such prioritized default rules: to compile them into ordinary logic programs (LP's) cf. pure Prolog. We apply the approach to a newly generalized version of courteous LP's, a semantically attractive and computationally tractable form of prioritized default rules. Compilation enables courteous LP's functionality to be added modularly to ordinary LP rule engines, via a preprocessor, with tractable computational overhead. This takes a long step towards actual deployment of prioitized-default knowledge representation in commercially fielded technology and applications.