Incorporating Defeasible Knowledge and Argumentative Reasoning in Web-Based Forms

SERGIO GÓMEZ; CARLOS IVÁN CHESÑEVAR; GUILLERMO SIMARI,

Edimburgo, Escocia

Workshop; 3rd Intl. Workshop on Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization; 2005

The notion of forms as a way of organizing and presenting data has long been used since the beginning of the WWW. Web-based forms have evolved together with the development of new markup languages (e.g., XML), in which it is possible to provide  validation scripts as part of the form code in order to test whether the intended meaning of the form is correct. However, for the form designer, part of this intended meaning involves frequently other features which are not constraints themselves, but rather 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 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 in a form. The proposed extension allows the specification of scripts for reasoning about form fields using a defeasible knowledge base, expressed web-based forms to incorporate defeasible attributes as part of the knowledge that can be encoded in a form.