A Proof Markup Language For Semantic Web Services

The Semantic Web is being designed to enable automated reasoners to be used as core components in a wide variety of Web applications and services. In order for a client to accept and trust a result produced by perhaps an unfamiliar Web service, the result needs to be accompanied by a justification that is understandable and usable by the client. In this paper, we describe the proof markup language (PML), an interlingua representation for justifications of results produced by Semantic Web services. We also introduce our Inference Web infrastructure that uses PML as the foundation for providing explanations of Web services to end users. We additionally show how PM L is critical for and provides the foundation for hybrid reasoning where results are produced cooperatively by multiple reasoners. Our contributions in this paper focus on technological foundations for capturing formal representations of term meaning and justification descriptions thereby facilitating trust and reuse of answers from web agents. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.