Defeasible Reasoning in Web-Based Forms through Argumentation

SERGIO GÓMEZ; CARLOS IVÁN CHESÑEVAR; GUILLERMO SIMARI,

International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making

World Scientific Publishing

Lugar: Singapur; Año: 2008 vol. 7 p. 71 - 101

0219-6220

The notion of forms as a way of organizing and presenting data has been used since the beginning of the World Wide Web. Web-based forms have evolved together with the development of new markup languages, in which it is possible to provide validation scripts as part of the form code to test whether the intended meaning of the form is correct. However, for the form designer, part of this intended meaning frequently involves  other features which are not constraints by themselves, but rather emph{attributes} emerging from the form, which provide plausible conclusions in the context of incomplete and potentially inconsistent information. As the value of such attributes may change in presence of new knowledge, we call them emph{defeasible attributes}. In this paper we propose extending traditional web-based forms to incorporate defeasible attributes as part of the knowledge that can be encoded by the form designer. The proposed extension allows the specification of scripts for reasoning about form fields using a defeasible knowledge base, expressed in terms of a Defeasible Logic Program.