Object-Oriented Modeling of Rule-Based Programming

A domain expertise always comprises a set of concepts and the logical relationships between them. In rule-based programming, rules which describe logical relationships are the fundamental knowledge units, and concepts are embedded in the rules. Objectoriented programming takes the opposite way; objects or classes which are used to describe concepts are the essential knowledge units, and all operations regarding an object are bound together into the object’s definition. By embedding rules within objects, this paper designs a factor-centered representation language, Factor++, which models the rule-based paradigm into object-oriented programming. We demonstrate that Factor++ provides facilities to represent all the information that can be represented in rule schema + rule body, a rule-based representation language.