Tropos is an agent-oriented software methodology proposed in [1, 2]. The methodology is founded on the notions of agent and goal, and goal analysis is used extensively to support software development during different phases. This paper adopts a formal goal model defined and analyzed in [9, 15] to make the goal analysis process concrete through the use of forward and backward reasoning for goal ...

Method engineering proposes the construction of methodologies by selecting method fragments from a repository and assembling then in an appropriate way. However, the rules by which the “optimal” method fragments are chosen are not clear, and such chores are usually done manually by an expert. This paper presents a goal analysis technique for the selection of the optimal method fragments from a ...

Natural Expert is a product that allows users to build knowledge based systems. It uses a lazy functional language, Natural Expert Language, to implement backward chaining and provide a reliable knowledge processing environment in which development can take place. Customers from all over the world buy the system and have used it to handle a variety of problems, including applications such as ai...

We present a family of dialectic proof procedures for the admissibility semantics of assumption-based argumentation. These proof procedures are defined for any conventional logic formulated as a collection of inference rules and show how any such logic can be extended to a dialectic argumentation system. The proof procedures find a set of assumptions, to defend a given belief, by starting from ...

This paper shows that the various computations underlying spatial cognition can be implemented using statistical inference in a single probabilistic model. Inference is implemented using a common set of 'lower-level' computations involving forward and backward inference over time. For example, to estimate where you are in a known environment, forward inference is used to optimally combine locat...

The SuperJournal research project evaluated the usage within UK academia of a set of electronic journals made available through a bespoke electronic journal application via the World Wide Web. This paper describes the data handling processes which comprised the production system required to import publisher supplied journal data into the SuperJournal application. In particular, it focuses on th...

In ∀∃-rules, the conclusion may contain existentially quantified variables, which makes reasoning tasks (as deduction) non-decidable. These rules have the same logical form as TGD (tuplegenerating dependencies) in databases and as conceptual graph rules. We extend known decidable cases by combining backward and forward chaining schemes, in association with a graph that captures exactly the noti...