Algernon Tutorial 4.a
Designing a Rule-Based System

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Tutorial 4 guides you through the design and implementation of a small rule-based system. It uses the newspaper project included in the examples folder of your Protege installation. You can use either the "old" newspaper project that was included in projects before Protege 1.8beta build 1030, or the revised project that was included after that date.

Overview

The editors of the newspaper want a rule-based system to help them manage the billing for the newspaper ads. The additional functionality they want is:

Manage information about customers.
Do billing for ads placed.
Print a summary report listing ads sold in different categories.
Print a billing report for a specific customer.

Customers

Note that the Newspaper KB currently contains no specific information about Customers except for a Purchaser slot on the Article class. The editors want to:

Add new customers with name, address and telephone number.
Keep track of ads they purchase.
Track their current billing state.
Accept payments from customers.

Reports

Rudimentary reports can be printed directly from rules. However, for complex reports it may be necessary to collect information and pass it to an external report generator module.

Billing Information

The Newspaper example currently contains several billing charts, but this information will need to be expanded. For example, when a new ad is placed, its rate should be calculated and the customer should be billed.

Your tasks

Design and implement the necessary ontology changes.
Design and implement rules to handle the above operations.
Write documentation so people know how to handle customer billing in the new rule-based system.