Unit Testing in ASPIDE

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative logic programming formalism, which is employed nowadays in both academic and industrial real-world applications. Although some tools for supporting the development of ASP programs have been proposed in the last few years, the crucial task of testing ASP programs received less attention, and is an Achilles' heel of the available programming environments. In this paper we present a language for specifying and running unit tests on ASP programs. The testing language has been implemented in ASPIDE, a comprehensive IDE for ASP, which supports the entire life-cycle of ASP development with a collection of user-friendly graphical tools for program composition, testing, debugging, profiling, solver execution configuration, and output-handling.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, Proceedings of the 25th Workshop on Logic Programming (WLP 2011

Rethinking Answer Set Programming Templates

In imperative programming, the Domain-Driven Design methodology helps in coping with the complexity of software development by materializing in code the invariants of a domain of interest. Code is cleaner and more secure because any implicit assumption is removed in favor of invariants, thus enabling a fail fast mindset and the immediate reporting of unexpected conditions. This article introduces a notion of template for Answer Set Programming that, in addition to the don't repeat yourself principle, enforces locality of some predicates by means of a simple naming convention. Local predicates are mapped to the usual global namespace adopted by mainstream engines, using universally unique identifiers to avoid name clashes. This way, local predicates can be used to enforce invariants on the expected outcome of a template in a possibly empty context of application, independently by other rules that can be added to such a context. Template applications transpiled this way can be processed by mainstream engines and safely shared with other knowledge designers, even when they have zero knowledge of templates

Automated Support for Creating Experimental Setups in Material Sciences

Na área de conservação e restauro, o interesse na investigação de fontes escritas históricas tem vindo a crescer nos últimos anos, no entanto, estes estudos raramente exploram a evolução de materiais de pintura e a reprodução de receitas. As receitas são conjuntos de instruções para preparar materiais (vidro, pigmentos, esmaltes) e são reproduzidas com o objetivo de avaliar os métodos utilizados, bem como de determinar as causas da deterioração dos materiais. Na unidade de investigação VICARTE - Vidro e Cerâmica para as Artes, no âmbito da investigação da linha temática de estudos do património cultural, investigam-se estas receitas históricas através da sua reprodução, o que requer planear experiências tendo em consideração o material e os recursos disponíveis. No entanto, o número elevado de possíveis combinações de utilização destes recursos, tornam a realização do planeamento de forma manual complicada e morosa. Nesta dissertação foi desenvolvida uma solução para este problema, em colaboração com a unidade de investigação VICARTE, recorrendo ao uso de Answer Set Programming de forma a criar horários para a realização das experiências, otimizando os recursos dispo- níveis. Como resultado foi desenvolvida uma aplicação que facilita a criação dos mesmos.In the field of conservation and restoration, interest in the investigation of historical written sources has been growing in recent years, however, these studies rarely explore the evolution of painting materials and the reproduction of recipes. The recipes are a set of instructions for preparing materials (glass, pigments, enamels) and are reproduced in order to evaluate the methods used, as well as to determine the causes of deterioration of the materials. In the research unit VICARTE - Glass and Ceramics for the Arts, within the scope of research in the thematic line of studies of cultural heritage, these historical recipes are investigated through their reproduction, which requires planning experiments taking into account the material and resources available. However, the high number of possible combinations for the use of these resources makes manual planning complicated and time consuming. In this dissertation, was developed a solution to this problem, in collaboration with the research unit VICARTE, using Answer Set Programming in order to create schedules for performing the experiments, optimizing the available resources. As a result, was developed an application that facilitates the creation of these