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.

Baral shows how to write programs that behave intelligently, by giving them the ability to express knowledge and to reason. This unique book will appeal to practising and would-be knowledge engineers wishing to learn more about the subject in courses or through self-teaching.