Reference: Pinheiro da Silva, P.; McGuinness, D.L.; Fikes, R. Combinable Proof Fragments for the Web. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, January, 2003.
Abstract: Web applications must deal with a rapidly evolving, distributed, heterogeneous environment of information and reasoning services. Many applications obtain information from multiple sources and thus need to determine how, why, and when to use answers. Currently few if any web-based reasoning services make explanations available and, if they do, the supporting proofs of these explanations are rarely portable across applications. Thus, proofs, if available, are difficult to understand and more difficult to combine. This paper describes the properties of Inference Web (IW) portable proof fragments. These proof fragments can be combined and thus can be used to specify distributed proofs for web-based reasoning tasks. Moreover, the proof fragment can be used for merging proofs generated by distinct applications. We introduce the portable proof fragment specification used to enable Inference Web applications by example. Our examples are chosen from real world configuration-driven examples.
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