Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Declarative Problem Solving

Knowledge management and knowledge-based intelligence are areas of importance in the economy and society, and to exploit them fully and efficiently it is necessary both to represent and reason about knowledge via a declarative interface whose input language is based on logic. In this book, originally published in 2003, Chitta Baral shows exactly how to go about doing that: how to write programs that behave intelligently by giving them the ability to express knowledge and reason about it. He presents a language, AnsProlog, for both knowledge representation and reasoning, and declarative problem solving. The results have been organised here into a form that will appeal to practising and would-be knowledge engineers wishing to learn more about the subject, either in courses or through self-teaching. A comprehensive bibliography rounds off the book.

Preface; 1. Declarative programming in AnsProlog*: introduction and preliminaries; 2. Simple modules for declarative programming with answer sets; 3. Principles and properties of declarative programming with answer sets; 4. Declarative problem solving and reasoning in AnsProlog*; 5. Reasoning about actions and planning in AnsProlog*; 6. Complexity, expressiveness, and other properties of AnsProlog* programs; 7. Answer set computing algorithms; 8. Query answering and answer set computing systems; 9. Further extensions of and alternatives to AnsProlog*; 10. Appendix A: Ordinals, lattices, and fixpoint theory; 11. Appendix B: Turing machines; Bibliography; Index of notation; Index of terms.