Using Reflective Logic Programming to Describe Domain Knowledge as an Aspect

Software applications, mostly consisting of an algorithm applied to domain knowledge, are hard to maintain and to reuse as a result of their hard coded combination. We propose to follow the principles of aspect-oriented programming, separating the domain from the algorithm and describing them in a logic and conventional programming language respectively. In this paper, we report on an experiment that was conducted to validate this hypothesis, and to investigate the requirements of a programming environment for this con_guration. An already existing environment that uses a logic meta-language to reason about objectoriented systems, SOUL, is used as a starting point for this experiment. The result is a working implementation in SOUL, which validates our ideas, reveals mechanisms that require more research, and points to other features that should be included.