Knowledge markup and XML-based distributed automated reasoning

Automated reasoning is a fundamental technique for many fields of computer science. This paper mainly focuses on the following two issues: the knowledge and problems representation on the Web, and how a reasoning system can provide users on the Web with reasoning Web services. As to the first issue, we propose MSKML (abbr. many-sorted knowledge markup language) as the language for knowledge and problems representation on the Web; as to the second, the automated reasoning server provides Web users with automated reasoning services through the SOAP (simple object access protocol). When a client on the Web need the automated reasoning services, it represents the problem as a XML (extensible markup language) file conforming to the MSKML DTD (document type definition) and sends a SOAP request message including the XML file to the automated reasoning server, and the automated reasoning server represents the solution as a XML file conforming to the MSKML DTD and send it back to the client as the SOAP response message. A prototype system is implemented and an example is given to illustrate our work.