Declarative Functionality Descriptions of Interactive Reasoning Modules

In this paper a semantical framework is developed that provides a logical description of the functionality of an interactive reasoning module. In particular it can be made more transparent by this framework whether or not the conclusions that may be drawn by a reasoning module fit to the situation that is concerned (soundness and completeness). It will be established that, considered from the viewpoint of functionality, the knowledge in a reasoning module always can be normalized to knowledge in rule format. This shows that the rule format essentially is expressive enough to specify the functionality of a reasoning module. This result gives a justification for the choice that has been made in our framework for design and specification of interacting reasoning modules, DESIRE.