On September 29, 2021, the winners of the 20th annual e-government competition were announced. The competition covers a list of categories of projects across Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.
In the category of “Projects using Innovative Technologies and Infrastructures”, the winning entry was “Funding for companies in the corporate service portal (USP) with methods of symbolic artificial intelligence,” from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs.
The presentation for their project in the original German is available here.
Essentially, to enable businesses to get better access to grants for which they might qualify, the developers used data about those businesses that was already present in the business portal, and combined that with “formally-represented eligibility criteria” (the Rules as Code part) for the different available grants.
If information was missing to be able to do the assessment, a user form was generated automatically to collect the required information from the user. The encoding was done in common LISP. The traceability of the reasoning was used to generate colour-coded and tree-structured diagrams indicating how the tool had reached its conclusions.
