An explanation facility framework for rule-based systems

Abstract

Rule engines, business rule management systems and other rule-based systems used today widely utilize methods, techniques and technologies from the era of expert systems. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case when it comes to explanation facilities. Nowadays, the use of explanation facilities seems more important than ever. Business rule management systems control or constrain the behavior of business processes through business rules and an explanation of the inference process intended for the end user would be more than welcome. An explanation facility framework which was created in order to remedy this situation is presented in this paper. It is written in Java and is supposed to be a generic solution for modern rule-based systems. Besides being free and open-source, it is simple to use and can generate explanations in the form of natural language like sentences. Internationalization is also supported and explanations can be saved as textual, XML or PDF reports.