Deborah L. McGuinness and Paulo Pinheiro da Silva
Infrastructure for Web Explanations
Submitted for publication.
Abstract
The Semantic Web lacks support for explaining information
provenance. When web applications return answers, many users do not
know what information sources were used, when they were updated, how
reliable the source was, or what information was looked up versus
derived. The Semantic Web also lacks support for explaining reasoning
paths used to derive answers. The Inference Web (IW) aims to take
opaque query answers and make the answers more transparent by
providing explanations. The explanations include information
concerning where answers came from and how they were derived (or
retrieved). In this paper we describe an infrastructure for IW
explanations. The infrastructure includes: an extensible web-based
registry containing details on information sources, reasoners,
languages, and rewrite rules, a portable proof specification, and a
proof and explanation browser. Source information in the IW registry
is used to convey data provenance. Representation and reasoning
language axioms and rewrite rules in the IW registry are used to
support proofs, interoperability, and proof combination. The IW
browser is used to support navigation and presentations of proofs and
their explanations. The Inference Web is in use by two Semantic Web
agents using an embedded reasoning engine fully registered in the IW.
Additional reasoning engine registration is underway in order to help
provide input for evaluation of the adequacy, breadth, and scalability
of our approach.
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