Abstract

Participant at the Doctoral Mentoring programm of the 10th German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies (MATES 2012)

When it comes to the design time of software applications, unspecified details always leave room for alternatives. Each alternative requiring self-explanation capabilities in order help with the selection. This work subdivide the problem of self-explanation into four subproblems: First of all, we need to answer what is an explanation? In this work explanations are created by adding semantic and contextual information to descriptions (at runtime), which will ease the inference of some reasoner observing the explanation. Secondly, we need to know what kind of information should be contained in a self-explanation? This also implies the question on how much of a language needs to be known, to understand a description in this language. Afterwards, we must accomplish a way to explain semantic information using such a metalanguage and enriching it with contextual information. Hence, this work analyses the way components are described, how these descriptions are created and which methods of inference can be build upon them.