Grants4Companies: Applying Declarative Methods for Recommending and Reasoning About Business Grants in the Austrian Public Administration (System Description)
This work addresses the specific problem of automating grant recommendations for businesses in Austria, representing an incremental application of existing declarative methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of recommending suitable business grants to companies by using a logic-based expert system that evaluates formal grant conditions against business properties from Austrian public administration registers. The result is a live application integrated into the Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance's Business Service Portal.
We describe the methods and technologies underlying the application Grants4Companies. The application uses a logic-based expert system to display a list of business grants suitable for the logged-in business. To evaluate suitability of the grants, formal representations of their conditions are evaluated against properties of the business, taken from the registers of the Austrian public administration. The logical language for the representations of the grant conditions is based on S-expressions. We further describe a Proof of Concept implementation of reasoning over the formalised grant conditions. The proof of concept is implemented in Common Lisp and interfaces with a reasoning engine implemented in Scryer Prolog. The application has recently gone live and is provided as part of the Business Service Portal by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance.