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Abstract. Transparent information integration across distributed and heterogeneous data sources and computational tools is a prime concern for bioinformatics. Recently, there have been proposals for a semantic web addressing these requirements. A promising approach for such a semantic web are the integration of rules to specify and implement workflows and object-orientation to cater for computational aspects. We present PROVA, a Java-based rule-engine, which realises this integration. It enables one to separate a declarative description of information workflows from any implementation details and thus easily create and maintain code. We show how PROVA is used to compose an information and computation workflow involving -rules for specifying the workflow, -rules for reasoning over the data, -rules for accessing flat files, databases, and other services, and -rules involving heavy-duty computations. The resulting code is very compact and re-usable. We give a detailed account of PROVA and document its use with a example of a system, PSIMAP, which derives domain-domain interactions from multidomain structures in the PDB using the SCOP domain and superfamily definitions. PSIMAP is a typical bioinformatics application in that it integrates disparate information resources in different formats (flat files (PDB) and database (SCOP)) requiring additional computations. PROVA is available at comas.soi.city.ac.uk/prova

The use of the Unified Modelling Language (UML) during systems development has been growing in scale and complexity, often resulting in inconsistent speci3cations. In this paper we present a knowledge base goal-driven approach f o r consistency management of UML specifications represented as axioms, which define goals. We propose an inference procedure as a flexible pattern-based abduction used to build and morph paths based on the specifications. The approach involves a twostep interaction process between the specifications: observation and comparison. Prototypes of the knowledge base engine and of a tool to map UML specifications in XMI format to the knowledge base have been developed to demonstrate and evaluate the approach.