Explaining Answers from the Semantic Web: The Inference Web Approach

Abstract

In this article, we describe an infrastructure for IW explanations. The infrastructure includes: IWBase - an extensible web-based registry containing details about information sources, reasoners, languages, and rewrite rules; PML - the Proof Markup Language specification and API used for encoding portable proofs; IW browser - a tool supporting navigation and presentations of proofs, proof combination, and Semantic Web agent interoperability. The Inference Web is in use by four Semantic Web agents, three of them using embedded reasoning engines fully registered in the IW. Inference Web also provides explanation infrastructure for a number of DARPA and ARDA projects.

Keywords: Web Explanations, Inference Web, Knowledge Provenance, PML