Interactive session?

[Russell]

Hi guys,

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but the online examples appear to
be focused on a situation where you have an existing database of facts
and rules.

Is it possible to use Take to create a classic interactive inference
shell (eg like Mycin etc), where the user is prompted to enter more
facts as/if needed?

I have an interest in using rule engines for legal reasoning and was
wondering whether Take would be useful for my needs.

Thanks for your time,

Russell

[Jens Dietrich]

Hi Russell,

You can do this by using external fact sets as follows: a fact set is used at query time to produce an iterator over facts. You can provide an iterator that, when ask for the next fact (next()) pops up a dialog where the end user enters the data to be used to build the next fact. This fact is then returned and used for reasoning. Some possible modifications:

- provide many facts (after one fact has been returned, the iterators hasNext() still returns yes)
- provide one or no facts (yes/true scenario) - the iterator could be empty indicating "no"
- read facts from System.in for old-fashioned command-line applications

Hope this helps, Jens