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 practice deployment. DIPLOMAT is a Java library that embodies a new approach to the implementation of such prioritized default rules: to compile them into ordinary logic programs (with forward or backward inferencing, not simply prolog.) We apply the approach to a newly generalized version of courteous logic programs (LPs), a semantically attractive and computational overhead. This takes a long step towards actual deployment of prioritized default knowledge representation in commercially fielded technology and applications.
We give in the demo storyboard (appendix) an automated example of e-commerce application scenario: inferencing in a 6-rule courteous LP that represents personalized pricing and promotions on a bookstore's Web storefront.
By: Benjamin N. Grosof
Published in: RC21473 in 1999
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