Developing Rule-Based Applications for the Web: Methodologies and Tools

Abstract

Embedding rules into Web applications, and distributed applications in general, seems to constitute a significant task in order to accommodate desired expressivity features in such environments. Various methodologies and reasoning modules have been proposed to manage rules and knowledge on the Web. The main objective of the chapter is to survey related work in this area and discuss relevant theories, methodologies and tools that can be used to develop rule-based applications for the Web. The chapter deals with both ways that have been formally defined for modeling a domain of interest: the first based on standard logics while the second one stemmed from the logic programming perspective. Furthermore, a comparative study that evaluates the reasoning engines and the various knowledge representation methodologies, focusing on rules, is presented.