Aide (`AustLII Inferencing Development Environment') provides a quasi-natural language form of knowledge representation which is reasonably close to statutory language, but at the same time represents knowledge so that it can be used by an inferencing engine using predicate calculus.

The World Wide Web presents new challenges for the development of legal inferencing systems. This project starts by implementing via the web the inferencing component of the previous ‘DataLex’ research, through the wysh interface. This provides one solution to the problem of maintaining state in web interactions, while only requiring standard HTML and CGI facilities. Wysh knowledge bases can interact with other wysh knowledge bases located anywhere on the web, creating opportunities for new forms of ‘cooperative’ knowledge base development. Automated and customized means of linking knowledge bases and inferencing dialogues to a large dynamic ‘real world’ legal information system (the Australasian Legal Information Institute) are provided, giving one means of overcoming the ‘knowledge base lag’. The project’s development tools are available to any legal knowledge base developer via the web.This was the first paper to explain Austlii's approach to implementing rule-based reasoning systems in the context of free access to law legal information institutes.