21. The method of claim 20 , wherein the knowledge base model comprises a plurality of regulations, statues, legislations, interpretative guidelines, internal policies, or other types of laws that govern the structure and operations of a business concern or an individual; business procedures including reasoning steps, wherein each reasoning step is accomplished by making one or more decisions; parameters used by procedures, decisions, or rules; and concepts pertaining to a given application domain.
20. A computer implemented method for representing, using, and maintaining regulatory knowledge comprising: providing a knowledge base model for representation of regulatory knowledge, the knowledge base model including a plurality of entities represented and defined by at least one feature-value pair, wherein the feature's values may take multiple formats including numbers, flags, dates, symbolic concepts or relations to symbolic concepts, and relations to other entities, the plurality of entities including: (i) regulations, (ii) symbolic concepts, wherein the symbolic concept includes a structure containing a designated relation that allows for representing a hierarchy of concepts, (iii) procedures, (iv) parameters, (v) decisions, wherein decisions are described by the following additional features: problem statements that are text templates with placeholders that point to other elements of the knowledge base model, the decision type feature having a plurality of symbolic values that designate a type of decision, (vi) rules, wherein rules have relationships to decisions they make, and (vii) service calls, wherein service calls are described by the following additional features: service call message text templates with placeholders that point to other elements of the knowledge base model, and a service call type feature having a plurality of symbolic values that designate a type of a service call, and wherein the service call when executed by an external control apparatus causes certain actions to be taken by certain external software modules, and results of those actions may be returned back for storage; providing a data interface model for representation of data referred to by elements of the knowledge base model, the data interface model comprising a plurality of entities represented and defined by at least one feature-value pair, wherein the feature's values may take multiple formats including numbers, flags, dates, symbolic concepts or relations to symbolic concepts, relations to other entities of the regulatory knowledge base model or to other elements of the data interface model, the plurality of entities including: (i) simple events, (ii) complex events that contain summaries and relationships to simple events, (iii) entities that are referred to by simple events and complex events and that relate to elements of the knowledge base model, and (iv) profiles of entities; providing an interface module; receiving in the interface module an input request in the form of a structured or semi-structured format text message; sending the received input request to a reasoning engine; receiving in the reasoning engine the input request from the interface module; matching the received input request to rules included in a reasoning engine rule base; applying the rules to an internal algorithm; executing the internal algorithm to resolve the input request; producing an output response; sending the output response to the interface module; receiving in the interface module the output response from the reasoning engine; providing a reasoning session model for representation of the reasoning process data, the reasoning session model comprising: (i) a data structure that supports storage of reasoning session records, and (ii) a data structure that supports storage of session events, wherein each session event represents an individual decision that is made using the computer implemented method.