Executable declarative business rules and their use in electronic commerce

Business rules are statements which are used to run the activities of an organization. In the era of electronic commerce it is important for these rules to be represented explicitly, and to be automatically applicable. In this paper we argue that methods from the field of knowledge representation can be used for this purpose. In particular, we propose the use of defeasible reasoning, a simple but efficient reasoning method based on rules and priorities. We motivate the use of defeasible reasoning, give examples, describe two case studies, and outline current and future work in our research.