The Production Logic Programs Approach, in a Nutshell: Foundations for Semantically Interoperable Web Rules

We overview our foundational work on a knowledge representation (KR) approach of web rules that are semantically interoperable between all four of the currently most commercially important families of rule systems, including production rules, relational database management systems, event-condition-action rules, and Prolog. Called here Production Logic Programs (PLP), the approach combines high degrees of expressiveness, scaleability, and incremental/modular implementability. Its KR is based on declarative logic programs, extending Datalog with several major web-izing and expressive features. These include, notably, a new approach to actions and tests via procedural attachments – in the manner of production rules but with declarative semantics. The PLP approach includes smoothly and powerfully combining rules with ontologies drawn from the currently most commercially important kinds of web-shared semantic ontologies. The PLP approach has been piloted and evolved in a number of important rule formats, tools, and efforts – including RuleML, SWRL, SWSL/SWSF, WSML/WRL, and SweetRules. An advanced set of PLP capabilities have already been implemented in open source and used to prototype a variety of e-business application scenarios.