OntoDLV An Object-Oriented Disjunctive Logic Programming System.pdf

OntoDLV: An Object-Oriented Disjunctive Logic Programming System Nicola Leone, Francesco Ricca Department of Mathematics, University of Calabria, Rende (CS) 87036, Italy Abstract. The paper presents OntoDLV a system based on an extension of Disjunctive Logic Programming (DLP) which combines the expres- sive power of DLP with the modeling capabilities of the object-oriented languages. In particular, the OntoDLV language supports the most im- portant object-oriented constructs including classes, objects, (multiple) inheritance, and types. OntoDLV is built on top of DLV (a state-of-the art DLP system), and provides a graphical user interface that allows to specify, update, browse, query, and reason on knowledge bases. Two strong points of the system are the powerful type-checking mechanism, and the advanced interface for visual querying. 1 Introduction Disjunctive Logic Programming under the Stable Model Semantics [1] (DLP) is an expressive logic programming language, which has been proposed in the area of nonmonotonic reasoning and logic programming. The high expressive power of DLP [2] can be profitably exploited when one has to deal with problems of high complexity, and this makes DLP an ad- vanced formalism for Knowledge Representation and commonsense Reasoning (KRR)[1]. Moreover, the availability of a couple of efficient DLP systems, like DLV [3], GnT [4] and, more recently, the disjunctive version of Cmodels [5] make DLP a powerful tool for developing advanced knowledge-based applications [6, 7]. Despite its high expressiveness, there are several problems that DLP can- not encode in a natural way. For instance, it misses constructs for representing complex real-world entities[8], like classes, objects, compound objects, and tax- onomies. Moreover, DLP systems are missing tools for supporting the program- mers, like type-checkers and easy-to-use graphical environments, to manage the large and complex domains to be dealt with in real-world applications. The recent