Valentin's Blog

There is a considerable gap between the potential of rules bases to be a simpler way to formulate high level knowledge and the reality of tiresome and error prone rule bases creation processes.
Based on the experience from three rule base creation projects this paper identifies reasons for this gap between promise and reality and proposes steps that can be taken to close it. An architecture for a complete support of rule base development is presented.

A publication of mine accepted for this years ICEIS conference, you can read the whole thing here.

Labels: KBSDevelopment, publication

In this paper we describe novel ideas and their prototypical implementation for the visualization of rule bases. In the creation of the visualization our approach considers not only the structure of a rule base but also records of its usage. We also discuss methods to address the challenges for visualization tools posed by rule bases that are large, created with high level knowledge acquisition tools or that contain low level rules that should remain hidden from the users.

My paper for the special track on knowledge visualization of the I-Know conference this fall. The entire paper is here. Its no rocket science, but I really think its something that's generally useful (for relatively small rule bases) and that hasn't been done before.

Labels: KBSDevelopment, publication

Another publication, it reflects on adoption of agile methodologies (in particular XP) for the use in the development of rule bases. I developed the ideas while writing an offer for a very interesting contract to develop some rule based system; still not decided whether we get the contract, but at least I got a paper out of it :)

Both reviewers gave it the highest possible score for readability - so if this topic interests you at all you can read the paper here.  

Recently, with the large scale practical use of business rule systems and the interest of the Semantic Web community in rule languages, there is an increasing need for methods and tools supporting the development of rule based systems. Existing methodologies fail to address the challenges posed by modern development processes in these areas: namely the increasing number of end user programmers and the increasing interest in iterative methods.

To address these challenges we propose and discuss the adoption of agile methods for the developments of rule based systems. The main contribution of this paper are three development principles for and changes to the XP development process to make it suitable for the development of rule based systems.

I'm the sole author and I'll be presenting it at the 16th International Conference on Information Systems Development (ISD2007) in Galway. The submitted version (still anonymous, the conference has a double blind review process) is here.

Labels: KBSDevelopment, publication

We present Explorative Debugging as a novel debugging paradigm for rule based languages. Explorative Debugging allows truly declarative debugging of rules and is well suited to support rapid, try and- error development of rules. We also present the Inference Explorer, an open source explorative debugger for horn rules on top of RDF.

By myself and Andreas Abecker.  I'll be presenting it at the Scripting for the Semantic Web Workshop at the European Semantic Web conference next week.

You can read the entire paper here, I think its actually quite readable and worth your time (if you have any interested in how to debug rules - that is).

I haven't really decided on how much further I develop this line of research and the implementation of this debugger - Hence I' ld love to hear any feedback concerning this ideas - think its worthwhile? waste of time? better debuggers exist already? Would use such a tool?

Labels: KBSDevelopment, publication

With the growing interest in rule languages in the Semantic Web and the Business Rule community it is time to look again at the issue of debugging rule bases. New challenges have arisen since the time most concepts for today's debuggers where created: end user programming has grown in importance, graphical editors have become more common and programs are increasingly interconnected. Today there is no debugger for rule-based systems that takes into account the declarative nature of rules and that addresses these challenges.

This paper proposes Explorative Debugging as a paradigm for building debuggers that truly take into account the declarative nature of rules. The Inference Explorer is presented as an implementation of the explorative debugging ideas.

A publication by me and Andreas Abecker that was accepted for this years SEKE conference (Nineteenth International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering). 

It is a paper more about the challenges for debugging and less about the solution ... I hopefully post a paper that concentrates on the core concepts of Explorative Debugging in a week or two (IF it gets accepted :)

The entire paper is here.

Labels: KBSDevelopment, publication