Disjunctive logic programming: A survey and assessment

Abstract

We describe the fields of disjunctive logic programming and disjunctive deductive databases from the time of their inception to the current time. Contributions with respect to semantics, implementations and applications are surveyed. In the last decade many semantics have been proposed out of which we highlight what we believe to be the most influential ones and compare them. Basic ideas have been borrowed from the semantics of normal logic programs such as stable model semantics and well-founded semantics, which have been generalized in various ways to obtain semantics of disjunctive logic programs. We discuss disjunctive systems such as DLV and Smodels, and related non-disjunctive systems such as XSB and DeReS, that have been implemented. We also describe applications of disjunctive logic programming: reasoning about declarative specifications, reasoning about actions, diagnosis (e.g. in medicine or biology), and in data integration that have resource predicates defined by multiple rules.We discuss the future needs to make the field practical: e.g. integrating concepts from databases (such as aggregation), optimization methods, and object orientation. In Section 12 we discuss the influence that Bob Kowalski had on our work. © 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.