Object mapping for markup semantics

The BECHAMEL system is a knowledge representation and inference environment for expressing and testing semantic rules and constraints for markup languages. Written in Prolog, the system provides predicates for processing the syntactic structures that emerge from a SGML/XML parser, defining object classes, instantiating object instances, assigning values to properties, and establishing relationships between or among object instances. BECHAMEL uses Prolog’s built-in capabilities to derive inferences from these facts. Part of the ongoing development of BECHAMEL involves experimenting with strategies for mapping syntactic relations to object relations and properties. This paper describes the current strategy, based on a blackboard model. Advantages of this approach include context free rules and the potential to exploit parallel processing for scalability. It has the drawback, however, of not permitting evidence to be described in ways people are likely to find natural or familiar. By using the current approach to produce formal accounts of the semantics of popular markup languages, we hope to learn a great deal about the ways markup syntax typically cues semantic relationships. That advance in our understanding will inform the development of more usable languages for object mapping.