AAAI Conference 1999 Conference Paper
DIPLOMAT: Compiling Prioritized Default Rules into Ordinary Logic Programs, for E-Commerce Applications
- Benjamin N. Grosof
- IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Rules promise to be widely useful in Internet electronic commerce. Declarative prioritized default rule knowledge representations offer the advantage of handling con icts that arise in updating rule sets, but have as yet had little practical 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 (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 prioritized-default knowledge representation in commercially fielded technology and applications. We give in the demo storyboard an automated example e-commerce application scenario: inferencing in a 70-rule courteous LP that represents personalized pricing and promotions on a bookstore’s Web storefront. The extended version of this paper, available as an IBM Research Report, contains the demo storyboard and technical details.