Towards Building Semantic Decision Tables With Domain Ontologies

Decision tables are a simple yet important and powerful tool to help implement the complex logic of many domains. However, the definition of concepts, variables and rules that underlie a decision table often are or become implicit. As the decision tables grow, ambiguities, inconsistencies and conceptual reasoning difficulties arise and building them becomes a time-consuming and difficult task. In order to address the problems, we use ontologies to represent, store and maintain the domain concepts. A decision table annotated with domain ontologies is called Semantic Decision Table (SDT). The rules that are generated from the formal commitment, together with the existing domain ontologies constitute the knowledge kernel of SDT. SDT is modeled in the DOGMA framework. It contains plausible binary facts called SDT lexons, and the SDT commitments, which the agents use to constrain and use the lexons. To facilitate reasoning, we encode the SDT commitments in Prolog prototype. In this paper, we focus on how to write SDT commitments in Prolog. Furthermore, we illustrate the design of the tool and its implementation.