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.

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: At present, the World Wide Web faces several problems regarding the search for specific in formation, arising, on the one hand, from the vast number of information sources available, and, on the other hand, from their intrinsic heterogeneity. A promising approach for solving the complex problems emerging in this context is the use of information agents in a multi-agent environment, which cooperatively solve advanced information-retrieval problems. An intelligent information agent provides advanced capabilities resorting to some form of logical reasoning, based on ad-hoc-knowledge about the task in question and on background knowledge of the domain, suitably represented in a knowledge base. In this thesis, our interest is in the role which some methods from the field of declarative logic programming can play in the realization of reasoning capabilities for intelligent information agents. We consider the task of updating extended logic programs (ELPs), since, in order to ensure adaptivity, an agent s knowledge base is subject to change. To this end, we develop update agents, which follow a declarative update policy and a reimplemented in the IMPACT agent environment. The proposed update agents adhere to a clear semantics and are able to deal with incomplete or in consistent information in an appropriate way. Furthermore, we introduce a framework for reasoning about evolving knowledgebases, which are represented as ELPs and maintained by an update policy. We describe a formal model which captures various update approaches, and define a logical language for expressing properties of evolving knowledge bases. We further investigate these mantical properties of knowledge states with respect to reasoning. In particular, we describe finitary characterizations of the knowledge evolution, and derive complexity results for our framework. Finally, we consider aparticular problem of information agents, namely information source selection, and develop an intelligent site-selection agent. We use ELPs for representing relevant knowledge and for declarative query an alysis and query abstraction. We define syntax and semantics of declarative site-selection programs, making use of advanced methods from answer set programming for priority handling and quantitative reasoning. A site selection component is implemented on top of the DLVKR system and its plp front-end for prioritized ELPs. We report experimental results for this implementation, [...]

Improve Your Creativity, Effectiveness, and Ultimately, Your Code In Modern Software Engineering, continuous delivery pioneer David Farley helps software professionals think about their work more effectively, manage it more successfully, and genuinely improve the quality of their applications, their lives, and the lives of their colleagues. Writing for programmers, managers, and technical leads at all levels of experience, Farley illuminates durable principles at the heart of effective software development. He distills the discipline into two core exercises: learning and exploration and managing complexity. For each, he defines principles that can help you improve everything from your mindset to the quality of your code, and describes approaches proven to promote success. Farley's ideas and techniques cohere into a unified, scientific, and foundational approach to solving practical software development problems within realistic economic constraints. This general, durable, and pervasive approach to software engineering can help you solve problems you haven't encountered yet, using today's technologies and tomorrow's. It offers you deeper insight into what you do every day, helping you create better software, faster, with more pleasure and personal fulfillment. Clarify what you're trying to accomplish Choose your tools based on sensible criteria Organize work and systems to facilitate continuing incremental progress Evaluate your progress toward thriving systems, not just more "legacy code" Gain more value from experimentation and empiricism Stay in control as systems grow more complex Achieve rigor without too much rigidity Learn from history and experience Distinguish "good" new software development ideas from "bad" ones Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Baral shows how to write programs that behave intelligently, by giving them the ability to express knowledge and to reason. This book will appeal to practising and would-be knowledge engineers wishing to learn more about the subject in courses or through self-teaching.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 15th International Conference on Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge M- agement, INAP 2004, and the 18th Workshop on Logic Programming, WLP 2004, which were held jointly in Potsdam, Germany, from March 4th to 6th, 2004. Declarative programming is an advanced paradigm for the modeling and solving of complex problems. This speci?cation method has become more and more attractive in recent years, for example, in the domains of databases, for the processing of natural language, for the modeling and processing of combinatorial problems, and for establishing knowledge-based systems for the Web. The INAP conferences provide a forum for intensive discussions of appli- tions of important technologies around logic programming, constraint problem solving, and closely related advanced software. They comprehensively cover the impact of programmable logic solvers in the Internet society, its underlying te- nologies, and leading-edge applications in industry, commerce, government, and social services. The Workshops on Logic Programming are the annual meeting of the Society for Logic Programming (GLP e.V.). They bring together researchers interested in logic programming, constraint programming, and related areas like databases and arti?cial intelligence. Previous workshops have been held in Germany, A- tria, and Switzerland. Thetopicsoftheselectedpapersofthisyear’sjointconferenceconcentrateon three currently important ?elds: knowledge management and decision support, constraint programming and constraint solving, and declarative programming and Web-based systems.

This book gives a tutorial overview of Gödel, presents example programs, provides a formal definition of the syntax and semantics of the language, and covers background material on logic. Gödel is a new, general-purpose, declarative programming language that is based on the paradigm of logic programming and can be regarded as a successor to Prolog. This book gives a tutorial overview of Gödel, presents example programs, provides a formal definition of the syntax and semantics of the language, and covers background material on logic. The Gödel language supports types and modules. It has a rich collection of system modules and provides constraint solving in several domains. It also offers metalogical facilities that provide significant support for metaprograms that do analysis, transformation, compilation, verification, debugging, and the like. The declarative nature of Gödel makes it well suited for use as a teaching language, narrows the gap that currently exists between theory and practice in logic programming, makes possible advanced software engineering tools such as declarative debuggers and compiler generators, reduces the effort involved in providing a parallel implementation of the language, and offers substantial scope for parallelization in such implementations. Logic Programming series

Provides a systematic introduction to the theory of logic programming and shows how this theory can be applied to reason about pure Prolog programs. The text includes an introduction to programming in Prolog and deals with such programming issues as determination, occur-check freedom and absence of errors. It covers both the natural interpretations of logic programming, as declarative specification and as procedure for computer execution.