Refactoring the Whitby Intelligent Tutoring System for Clean Architecture

TL;DR

This paper describes refactoring the Whitby Intelligent Tutoring System into a cleaner, more modular architecture using Logtalk to enhance code reuse and extensibility, focusing on the system's core logic and pedagogical frameworks.

Contribution

The paper presents a systematic refactoring of Whitby from Prolog to Logtalk, decoupling components for improved modularity and reusability in ITS applications.

Findings

Refactored Whitby into Logtalk for better modularity.

Enhanced code reuse through decoupling of components.

Evaluated architecture improvements in two iterations.

Abstract

Whitby is the server-side of an Intelligent Tutoring System application for learning System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), a methodology used to ensure the safety of anything that can be represented with a systems model. The underlying logic driving the reasoning behind Whitby is Situation Calculus, which is a many-sorted logic with situation, action, and object sorts. The Situation Calculus is applied to Ontology Authoring and Contingent Scaffolding: the primary activities within Whitby. Thus many fluents and actions are aggregated in Whitby from these two sub-applications and from Whitby itself, but all are available through a common situation query interface that does not depend upon any of the fluents or actions. Each STPA project in Whitby is a single situation term, which is queried for fluents that include the ontology, and to determine what pedagogical interventions to offer. Initially Whitby was written in Prolog using a module system. In the interest of a cleaner architecture and implementation with improved code reuse and extensibility, the initial application was refactored into Logtalk. This refactoring includes decoupling the Situation Calculus reasoner, Ontology Authoring framework, and Contingent Scaffolding framework into third-party libraries that can be reused in other applications. This extraction was achieved by inverting dependencies via Logtalk protocols and categories, which are reusable interfaces and components that provide functionally cohesive sets of predicate declarations and predicate definitions. In this paper the architectures of two iterations of Whitby are evaluated with respect to the motivations behind the refactor: clean architecture enabling code reuse and extensibility.