1 research outputs found
Understanding Rulelog Computations in Silk
Rulelog is a knowledge representation and reasoning language based on logic
programming under the well-founded semantics. It is an extension of the
language of Flora-2 and so supports inheritance and other object-oriented
features, as well as the higher-order syntax of Hilog. However, Rulelog rules
may also contain quantifiers and may be contra-positional. In addition, these
rules are evaluated in the presence of defeasibility mechanisms that include
rule cancellation, rule priorities, and other aspects. Rulelog programs are
sometimes developed by loosely coordinated teams of knowledge engineers (KEs)
who are not necessarily programmers. This requires not only declarative
debugging support, but also support for profiling to help KEs understand the
overall structure of a computation, including its termination properties. The
design of debugging and profiling tools is made more challenging because
Rulelog programs undergo a series of transformations into normal programs, so
that there is a cognitive distance between how rules are specified and how they
are executed.
In this paper, we describe the debugging and profiling environment for
Rulelog implemented in the integrated development environment of the Silk
system. Our approach includes an interface to justification graphs, which treat
why-not and defeasibility as well as provenance of the rules supporting
answers. It also includes tools for trace-based analysis of computations to
permit understanding of erroneous non-termination and of general performance
issues. For semantically correct cases of the non-terminating behavior, Silk
offers a different approach, which addresses the problem in a formally sound
manner by leveraging a form of bounded rationality called restraint.Comment: Part of WLPE 2013 proceedings (arXiv:1308.2055