Towards Checking Hybrid Proofs on the Web

The distributed and heterogeneous nature of today’s applications such as the Web implies that a variety of agents may participate in answering questions. Since multiple agents with various reasoning methods and representation languages are possible, inference rules used to derive any particular answer may be quite diverse. In this paper we introduce the Inference Meta Language to represent inference rules in an abstract and uniform way. The language may be used to annotate proofs enabling them to be automatically checked. Checking may be critical if systems combine answers, i.e., web service composition. We have implemented a parser and checker for the language and it is in use in several proof-based explanation solutions.