Integrating external functions in an object oriented reasoning system

Abstract

The paper describes an object-oriented system that smoothly integrates procedural function invocation and declarative rule reasoning into a single homogeneous system. This allows efficient computations expressed as external functions to be incorporated into rule systems to improve computational efficiency and extensibility of intelligent systems. We first discuss the differences between declarative rules and procedural functions. We then describe an object-oriented model that incorporates both of these. The model has a translation phase and an execution phase. We also discuss problems arising from the different ways that data are represented (terms in rules vs. data objects in functions), from the existence of user-defined types in functions and the necessary argumentations to the unification process in the rule system.<>