Toward A High-Level Reasoning Module for Enterprise Information Systems

We propose and describe a working program to assist in the overall management of the information resources of an organization. Such a module would be the "brain" of an enterprise information system. It would possess an understanding of all the digitally stored information of the organization, and it would act as a monitor, watching over and supervising the enterprise information system. The program we describe is based on strong theoretical foundations of recent work in the logic programming community. In addition to possessing the many desirable characteristics of logic programs (such as pattern matching, dealing with uncertain and incomplete data, separation of knowledge and control, etc.), the program is novel. It can maintain multiple views of the word simultaneously, it can reason with respect to time, and it can introspect with respect to its beliefs. Further, given adequate definitions of what are abnormal relationships among various components of an enterprise information system, this module can detect problems within and between such systems.