Sunflower is a technology developed at SRI International to support automated reasoning applications. Sunflower can be applied to a broad variety of domains, and is especially well suited where there is need to reason about complex data and problems with a lot of interacting constraints and where there is a need to integrate heterogeneous knowledge.
Sunflower is an integrated development environment (IDE) for ontologies, rules, and reasoning (i.e., Semantic Technology) that is built on top of the representation language and reasoner Flora-2 and implemented in Eclipse. Sunflower provides a tightly integrated and synchronized suite of tools for ontology and rule understanding, editing, and validation. The tools include editors, search capabilities, graph views and query user interfaces. Sunflower also includes a reasoning engine that does not just give yes or no answers, but can provide explanations in English language and supports reasoning about hard and soft constraints and can rank solutions. Sunflower can be deployed as stand-alone system or along with existing systems as part of enterprise-level applications or client/server architectures via its Web API.
Sunflower technology has been applied to financial risk management and regulatory compliance, system interoperability for military training and testing, as well as design tradeoff analysis in the space domain. In the regulatory compliance domain, the approach augments existing regulation understanding and policy development processes to include codifying regulations into machine-understandable formats which are reusable for compliance analysis, auditing and other purposes. regulations are captured as ontologies, knowledge bases and rules by Subject Matter Experts (SME) in collaboration with Semantic Technology Engineer (STE). For the financial regulatory domain, Sunflower provides decision analysis support with underlying reasons as well as capabilities for provenance of rules and audit of past results, “what if” simulations to support planning and policy making, and understandable English language explanations that bring the technology closer to the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and decision makers.
For more information, contact Grit Denker.