% abstract for RuleML-2008 keynote talk Hyper Logic Programs in SILK: Redefining the KR Playing Field for Business and VLKB Benjamin Grosof Senior Research Program Manager, Knowledge Systems Vulcan Inc. We overview the approach taken by the SILK system, a new, highly ambitious effort to redefine the knowledge representation (KR) playing field for business rules and rule-based process management. The newest part of Vulcan Inc.'s Project Halo, SILK aims to provide key infrastructure for widely-authored VLKBs (Very Large Knowledge Bases) for business and science that answer questions, proactively supply information, and reason powerfully. SILK includes a highly expressive, fully semantic, rule language based expressively on the Hyper Logic Programs KR, together with components for reasoning, web knowledge interchange, and collaborative knowledge acquisition. Hyper LP newly synergizes several major strands of pure-research progress in KR based on extensions of declarative logic programs, which are the core KR of RuleML and Rule Interchange Format (RIF) as well as of databases (SQL, XQuery, and SPARQL) and most commercial implementations of OWL ontologies. Hyper LP adds: prioritized defaults cf. courteous and Defeasible Logic; higher-order and frames cf. F-Logic; tight integration of weakened full classical logic (including OWL) cf. generalized Description LP; actions and events cf. production rules, Event-Condition-Action rules, and Situated/Production LP. Key challenges for SILK include exploiting natural language in user interaction, parallelism in reasoning, and disjunction in expressiveness. We discuss prospects for the SILK approach to effectively interchange and integrate a high percentage of the world's structured knowledge starting from today's legacy forms. "SILK" stands for "Semantic Inferencing on Large Knowledge", what the next generation Web will be spun from.