Effectively Solving NP-SPEC Encodings by Translation to ASP

NP-SPEC is a language for specifying problems in NP in a declarative way. Despite the fact that the semantics of the language was given by referring to Datalog with circumscription, which is very close to ASP, so far the only existing implementations are by means of ECLiPSe Prolog and via Boolean satisfiability solvers. In this paper, we present translations from NP-SPEC into ASP, and provide an experimental evaluation of existing implementations and the proposed translations to ASP using various ASP solvers. The results show that translating to ASP clearly has an edge over the existing translation into SAT, which involves an intrinsic grounding process. We also argue that it might be useful to incorporate certain language constructs of NPSPEC into mainstream ASP

Stratified Negation in Limit Datalog Programs

There has recently been an increasing interest in declarative data analysis, where analytic tasks are specified using a logical language, and their implementation and optimisation are delegated to a general-purpose query engine. Existing declarative languages for data analysis can be formalised as variants of logic programming equipped with arithmetic function symbols and/or aggregation, and are typically undecidable. In prior work, the language of $\mathit{limit\ programs}$ was proposed, which is sufficiently powerful to capture many analysis tasks and has decidable entailment problem. Rules in this language, however, do not allow for negation. In this paper, we study an extension of limit programs with stratified negation-as-failure. We show that the additional expressive power makes reasoning computationally more demanding, and provide tight data complexity bounds. We also identify a fragment with tractable data complexity and sufficient expressivity to capture many relevant tasks.Comment: 14 pages; full version of a paper accepted at IJCAI-1

The Vadalog System: Datalog-based Reasoning for Knowledge Graphs

Over the past years, there has been a resurgence of Datalog-based systems in the database community as well as in industry. In this context, it has been recognized that to handle the complex knowl\-edge-based scenarios encountered today, such as reasoning over large knowledge graphs, Datalog has to be extended with features such as existential quantification. Yet, Datalog-based reasoning in the presence of existential quantification is in general undecidable. Many efforts have been made to define decidable fragments. Warded Datalog+/- is a very promising one, as it captures PTIME complexity while allowing ontological reasoning. Yet so far, no implementation of Warded Datalog+/- was available. In this paper we present the Vadalog system, a Datalog-based system for performing complex logic reasoning tasks, such as those required in advanced knowledge graphs. The Vadalog system is Oxford's contribution to the VADA research programme, a joint effort of the universities of Oxford, Manchester and Edinburgh and around 20 industrial partners. As the main contribution of this paper, we illustrate the first implementation of Warded Datalog+/-, a high-performance Datalog+/- system utilizing an aggressive termination control strategy. We also provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation.Comment: Extended version of VLDB paper <https://doi.org/10.14778/3213880.3213888

Tabled CLP for Reasoning Over Stream Data

The interest in reasoning over stream data is growing as quickly as the amount of data generated. Our intention is to change the way stream data is analyzed. This is an important problem because we constantly have new sensors collecting information, new events from electronic devices and/or from customers and we want to reason about this information. For example, information about traffic jams and costumer order could be used to define a deliverer route. When there is a new order or a new traffic jam, we usually restart from scratch in order to recompute the route. However, if we have several deliveries and we analyze the information from thousands of sensors, we would like to reduce the computation requirements, e.g. reusing results from the previous computation. Nowadays, most of the applications that analyze stream data are specialized for specific problems (using complex algorithms and heuristics) and combine a computation language with a query language. As a result, when the problems become more complex (in e.g. reasoning requirements), in order to modify the application complex and error prone coding is required. We propose a framework based on a high-level language rooted in logic and constraints that will be able to provide customized services to different problems. The framework will discard wrong solutions in early stages and will reuse previous results that are still consistent with the current data set. The use of a constraint logic programming language will make it easier to translate the problem requirements into the code and will minimize the amount of re-engineering needed to comply with the requirements when they change