AceRules Webservice

Introduction

This document describes the AceRules webservice. The service executes rules written in ACE and supports three different semantics. It uses SOAP 1.1 for communication and it can be accessed over the HTTP protocol using POST. The URL of the service is

http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/ws/acerules/acerulesws.perl

There is a WSDL file that defines the interface to the web service. Furthermore, there are two web interfaces that rely on the webservice. One of them is a technical interface that allows the user to observe the communication with the webservice. The other web interface focuses on usability and is intended for end users.

• WSDL file
• AceRules technical interface
• AceRules interface

The rest of this document gives a short description of how the SOAP messages have to look like, in order to be accepted by the AceRules webservice.

Request

A request to the AceRules webservice needs one single Request-element inside of the body-part of the SOAP-envelope. This element can contain the following sub-elements:

Note that only Program is mandatory. For example, a request to get back only the simple-rules and using word-guessing would look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<env:Envelope xmlns:env="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
    <env:Body>
        <ar:Request xmlns:ar="http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/acerules">
            <ar:Program>John is a customer.</ar:Program>
            <ar:Guess>on</ar:Guess>
            <ar:SimpleRulesOutput>on</ar:SimpleRulesOutput>
            <ar:AnswertextOutput>off</ar:AnswertextOutput>
        </ar:Request>
    </env:Body>
</env:Envelope>

Reply

The reply of the AceRules webservice has a single Reply-element inside of the body-part of the SOAP-message. The sub-elements of this element depend on the request:

For example, the request of the previous section would lead to the following reply:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<env:Envelope xmlns:env="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
    <env:Body>
        <ar:Reply xmlns:ar="http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/acerules">
            <ar:SimpleRules>customer('John').</ar:SimpleRules>
        </ar:Reply>
    </env:Body>
</env:Envelope>

For reading the rules (internal or simplified) with a Prolog engine, you need the following operator declarations:

:- op(400, fy, -).      % strong negation
:- op(400, fy, ~).      % negation as failure
:- op(1000, xfx, <-).   % rule
:- op(1100, xfx, ::).   % label attachment

The elements Trace and ACETrace contain a sequence of Step-elements. In the case of Trace, each of these Step-elements contains three elements describing the state of one inference step: Raw, Delete, and Consistent. In the case of ACETrace, there are only the two elements Raw and Consistent. Since both trace outputs are only allowed for courteous mode (which has always exactly one answer), there cannot be more than one of each trace output.

Contact

If you have questions, comments, bug reports, etc. don't hesitate to contact the developer.