A 25 Year Perspective On Logic Programming

This book celebratesthe 25th anniversaryof GULP—the Italian Associationfor LogicProgramming.Authored by Italian researchersat the leading edge of their ?elds, it presents an up-to-date survey of a broad collection of topics in logic programming, making it a useful reference for both researchers and students. During its 25-year existence, GULP has organised a wide range of national and international activities, including both conferences and summer schools. It has been especially active in supporting and encouraging young researchers, by providing scholarships for GULP events and awarding distinguished disser- tions. WeintheinternationallogicprogrammingcommunitylookuponGULPwith a combination of envy, admiration and gratitude. We are pleased to attend its conferences and summer schools, where we can learn about scienti?c advances, catch up with old friends and meet young students. It is an honour for me to acknowledge our appreciation to GULP for its outstanding contributions to our ?eld and to express our best wishes for its continuing prosperity in the future. March 2010 Robert Kowalski Imperial College London Preface On June 18, 1985, a group of pioneering researchers, including representatives from industry, national research labs, and academia, attended the constituent assembly of the Group of researchers and Users of Logic Programming (GULP) association. That was the starting point of a long adventure in science, that 1 we are still experiencing 25 years later. This volume celebrates this important event.

This exciting new text reveals both the evolution of this programming paradigm since its inception and the impressively broad scope of current research in the field. The contributors to this book are all leading world experts in Logic Programming, and they deal with both theoretical and practical issues. They address such diverse topics as: computational molecular biology, machine learning, mobile computing, multi-agent systems, planning, numerical computing and dynamical systems, database systems, an alternative to the "formulas as types" approach, program semantics and analysis, and natural language processing. XXXXXXX Neuer Text Logic Programming was founded 25 years ago. This exciting book reveals both the evolution of this programming paradigm and its impressively broad scope of current research. The contributions by leading computer scientists deal with both theoretical and practical issues. They address diverse topics such as: computational molecular biology, machine learning, mobile computing, multi-agent systems, numerical computing and dynamical systems, database systems, program semantics, natural language processing, and promising future directions.

The idea of this book grew out of a symposium that was held at Stony Brook in September 2012 in celebration of David S.Warren's fundamental contributions to Computer Science and the area of Logic Programming in particular. Logic Programming (LP) is at the nexus of Knowledge Representation, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematical Logic, Databases, and Programming Languages. It is fascinating and intellectually stimulating due to the fundamental interplay among theory, systems, and applications brought about by logic. Logic programs are more declarative in the sense that they strive to be logical specifications of "what" to do rather than "how" to do it, and thus they are high-level and easier to understand and maintain. Yet, without being given an actual algorithm, LP systems implement the logical specifications automatically. Several books cover the basics of LP but focus mostly on the Prolog language with its incomplete control strategy and non-logical features. At the same time, there is generally a lack of accessible yet comprehensive collections of articles covering the key aspects in declarative LP. These aspects include, among others, well-founded vs. stable model semantics for negation, constraints, object-oriented LP, updates, probabilistic LP, and evaluation methods, including top-down vs. bottom-up, and tabling. For systems, the situation is even less satisfactory, lacking accessible literature that can help train the new crop of developers, practitioners, and researchers. There are a few guides onWarren’s Abstract Machine (WAM), which underlies most implementations of Prolog, but very little exists on what is needed for constructing a state-of-the-art declarative LP inference engine. Contrast this with the literature on, say, Compilers, where one can first study a book on the general principles and algorithms and then dive in the particulars of a specific compiler. Such resources greatly facilitate the ability to start making meaningful contributions quickly. There is also a dearth of articles about systems that support truly declarative languages, especially those that tie into first-order logic, mathematical programming, and constraint solving. LP helps solve challenging problems in a wide range of application areas, but in-depth analysis of their connection with LP language abstractions and LP implementation methods is lacking. Also, rare are surveys of challenging application areas of LP, such as Bioinformatics, Natural Language Processing, Verification, and Planning. The goal of this book is to help fill in the previously mentioned void in the LP literature. It offers a number of overviews on key aspects of LP that are suitable for researchers and practitioners as well as graduate students. The following chapters in theory, systems, and applications of LP are included.

This volume contains the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, LPNMR 2015, held in September 2015 in Lexington, KY, USA. The 290long and 11 short papers presented together with 3 invited talks, the paper reporting on the Answer Set Programming competition, and four papers presented by LPNMR student attendees at the doctoral consortium were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. LPNMR is a forum for exchanging ideas on declarative logic programming, nonmonotonic reasoning, and knowledge representation. The aim of the LPNMR conferences is to facilitate interactions between researchers interested in the design and implementation of logic-based programming languages and database systems, and researchers who work in the areas of knowledge representation and nonmonotonic reasoning.

Includes tutorials, lectures, and refereed papers on all aspects of logic programming, including theoretical foundations, constraints, concurrency and parallelism, deductive databases, language design and implementation, nonmonotonic reasoning, and logic programming and the Internet. The International Conference on Logic Programming, sponsored by the Association for Logic Programming, includes tutorials, lectures, and refereed papers on all aspects of logic programming, including theoretical foundations, constraints, concurrency and parallelism, deductive databases, language design and implementation, nonmonotonic reasoning, and logic programming and the Internet.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, LPNMR '99, held in El Paso, Texas, USA, in December 1999. The volume presents 26 contributed papers and four invited talks, three appearing as extended abstracts and one as a full paper. Topics covered include logic programming, non-monotonic reasoning, knowledge representation, semantics, complexity, expressive power, and implementation and applicatons.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Logic Programming, ICLP 2009, held in Pasadena, CA, USA, in July2009. The 29 revised full papers together with 9 short papers, 4 invited talks, 4 invited tutorials, and the abstracts of 18 doctoral consortium articles were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 initial submissions. The papers cover all issues of current research in logic programming, namely semantic foundations, formalisms, nonmonotonic reasoning, knowledge representation, compilation, memory management, virtual machines, parallelism, program analysis, program transformation, validation and verification, debugging, profiling, concurrency, objects, coordination, mobility, higher order, types, modes, programming techniques, abductive logic programming, answer set programming, constraint logic programming, inductive logic programming, alternative inference engines and mechanisms, deductive databases, data integration, software engineering, natural language, web tools, internet agents, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics.