Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
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Configuration and Verification management
. In product configuration [121], ASP
has been used as a declarative semantics providing formal definitions for main con-
cepts in product configuration, including configuration models, requirements, and
valid configurations. And, in particular, in the field of software configuration, a
prototype configurator for the complete Debian Linux system distribution has been
implemented by using ASP [122].
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Knowledge Management
. ASP has a strong potential for exploitation in the area of
knowledge management and semantic technologies.
An ASP-based system for ontology representation and reasoning, called OntoDLV
[89], is employed in many real-world applications, ranging from e-learning to en-
terprise ontologies and agent-based applications. In [123] an ASP-based approach
to the problem of recognizing and extracting information from unstructured docu-
ments has been presented. While, in [124,125] a system for content classification,
called OLEX, is presented, which exploits ASP to extract concepts and semantic
metadata from documents.
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Security engineering
. In [126] it is shown how security protocols can be specified
and verified efficiently and effectively by embedding reasoning about actions into
logic programming. In particular, two significant case studies in protocol verifica-
tion have been modeled: the classical Needham-Schroeder public-key protocol, and
the Aziz-Diffie key agreement protocol for mobile communication.
Moreover, applications from various areas can be found in the literature, including auc-
tions [127], scheduling [128], policy description [129], workflow management [130],
outlier detection [131], linguistics [132], multi agent systems [133,134,135], and E-
learning [135].
Concluding, ASP is an appealing tool for knowledge representation and reasoning,
and thanks to the applicability the implementations of ASP solvers to real-world prob-
lems, it is tackling many industrially-relevant applications.
It is worth noting that, ASP systems are currently away from comfortably enabling
the development of industry-level applications; and, like any other programming lan-
guage, ASP needs tools and development methodologies to facilitate and improve the
coding process. At the time of this writing, the field of software engineering for ASP
has been already settled by the ASP community [136], and it is currently evolving. In-
deed, both methodologies (see Section 4) and prototype tools are already available (see
[137,93,136,138,139,89]).
Acknowledgements.
The author thanks all his co-authors over the years, for the discus-
sions and the work that laid the foundation to this overview; in particular Nicola Leone
and Francesco Ricca, with whom I co-authored a description, on which the present work
has been based.
References
1. McCarthy, J.: Programs with Common Sense. In: Proceedings of the Teddington Con-
ference on the Mechanization of Thought Processes, Her Majesty's Stationery Office,
pp. 75-91 (1959)
