Grants4Companies: Applying Declarative Methods for Recommending and Reasoning About Business Grants in the Austrian Public Administration (System Description)

TL;DR

This paper presents Grants4Companies, a logic-based expert system that recommends business grants in Austria by formalizing grant conditions and business properties, enabling automated reasoning and suitability evaluation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel declarative approach using formal logic representations and reasoning engines for grant recommendation in public administration.

Findings

System successfully recommends relevant grants to businesses.

Formal logic representation enables automated reasoning about grant eligibility.

Application is live and integrated into the Austrian Business Service Portal.

Abstract

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.