PSOA or Positional-Slotted Object-Applicative is a funny sounding but very important technology that was intentionally created by the not-for-profit organization RuleML Inc. to bridge the gap between different computing paradigms. RuleML is a industry standards organization focused on standard, global rule interoperability. RuleML is currently being specified as a Rule MetaLogic on the Web.
Many different techniques or paradigms have been created by humans for representing data, information, logic, knowledge, and models in forms that computers can interact with that data, information, logic, knowledge, and models.
PSOA was created to intentionally and consciously pull many of those specific important techniques together into one language creating what amounts to a universal translator:
PSOA is a very expressive (i.e. powerful logic, Turing Complete) and relatively safe (i.e. problems can occur such as a decidability problem, but craftsmen understand and can work around those problems to effectively manage risk) language that bridges between these different techniques all in this one machine-readable language.
PSOA can thus act as an intermediate language for interoperating between long-established languages. Its own safety properties can be derived from those of its translators and target logic engines.
PSOA is a full programming logic language that is often referred to as Full Prolog. Whereas "Pure Prolog" limits itself to Horn Clauses for safety and other reasons. Datalog is an even more safe subset of that is intended to be consistent with relational databases.
Why is all this important? If you want to implement things such as computational law, computational audit, computational economics, and computational regulation you need to be able to (a) express information symbolically and (b) process that information reliably, predictably, and effectively. You want the MAXIMUM about of expressiveness and reasoning capability with the MINIMUM chance of catastrophic system failure (i.e. getting stuck in an infinite loop, never able to finish a process, decidability problems, logical paradoxes, and such).
Tools exist for working with PSOA. PSOATransRun is a browser-based tool.
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