Handling Soft Constraints in the Semantic Web Architecture

Preece, Dr Alun and Chalmers, Dr Stuart and McKenzie, Mr Craig and Pan, Dr Jeff and Gray, Prof Peter (2006) Handling Soft Constraints in the Semantic Web Architecture. In Proceedings Reasoning on the Web Workshop (RoW2006) at WWW2006, Edinburgh, UK.

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In this paper we present a proposal for representing soft CSPs within the Semantic Web architecture. The proposal is motivated by the need for a service-providing agent to reason about its commitments as soft constraints. The two essential requirements addressed are: the need to associate utility values with constraints, to reflect the relative importance of satisfying them, and the need to make statements about which constraints are satisfied and violated by a given solution. The proposal builds upon previous work in defining a Semantic Web Constraint Interchange Format (CIF), which itself builds on the proposed Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL).The main contribution of this paper is a new ontology for representing soft CSPs; we also extend the previous form of CIF/SWRL. The soft CSP ontology is intended to be used with CIF/SWRL, but is also potentially usable with other constraint and rule representations.

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