Abstract DLV2 is an AI tool for knowledge representation and reasoning that supports answer set programming (ASP) – a logic-based declarative formalism, successfully used in both academic and industrial applications. Given a logic program modeling a computational problem, an execution of DLV2 produces the so-called answer sets that correspond one-to-one to the solutions to the problem at hand. The computational process of DLV2 relies on the typical ground & solve approach, where the grounding step transforms the input program into a new, equivalent ground program, and the subsequent solving step applies propositional algorithms to search for the answer sets. Recently, emerging applications in contexts such as stream reasoning and event processing created a demand for multi-shot reasoning: here, the system is expected to be reactive while repeatedly executed over rapidly changing data. In this work, we present a new incremental reasoner obtained from the evolution of DLV2 toward iterated reasoning. Rather than restarting the computation from scratch, the system remains alive across repeated shots, and it incrementally handles the internal grounding process. At each shot, the system reuses previous computations for building and maintaining a large, more general ground program, from which a smaller yet equivalent portion is determined and used for computing answer sets. Notably, the incremental process is performed in a completely transparent fashion for the user. We describe the system, its usage, its applicability, and performance in some practically relevant domains.

Abstract Automated compliance checking, i.e. the task of automatically assessing whether states of affairs comply with normative systems, has recently received a lot of attention from the scientific community, also as a consequence of the increasing investments in Artificial Intelligence technologies for the legal domain (LegalTech). The authors of this paper deem as crucial the research and implementation of compliance checkers that can directly process data in RDF format, as nowadays more and more (big) data in this format are becoming available worldwide, across a multitude of different domains. Among the automated technologies that have been used in recent literature, to the best of our knowledge, only two of them have been evaluated with input states of affairs encoded in RDF format. This paper formalizes a selected use case in these two technologies and compares the implementations, also in terms of simulations with respect to shared synthetic datasets.

DLV2 is an AI tool for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning which supports Answer Set Programming (ASP) – a logic-based declarative formalism, successfully used in both academic and industrial applications. Given a logic program modelling a computational problem, an execution of DLV2 produces the so-called answer sets that correspond one-to-one to the solutions. The computational process relies on the typical Ground&Solve approach where the grounding step transforms the input program into a new, equivalent ground program, and the subsequent solving step applies propositional algorithms to search for the answer sets. Recently, emerging applications in contexts such as stream reasoning and event processing demand for multi-shot reasoning: here, the system is expected to be reactive while repeatedly executed over rapidly changing data. In this work, we present a new incremental reasoner obtained from the evolution of DLV2 towards multi-shot reasoning. Rather than restarting the computation from scratch, the system remains alive and incrementally handles the internal grounding process: in a completely transparent fashion for the user, at each shot, it reuses previous computations for building and maintaining a large, more general ground program, from which a smaller yet equivalent portion is determined and used for computing answer sets. We describe the system, its usage, its applicability and performance in some practically relevant domains.

Keyhole neurosurgery is challenging, due to the complex anatomy of the brain and the inherent risk of damaging vital structures while reaching the surgical target. This paper presents a path planner for safe and effective neurosurgical interventions. The strengths of the proposed framework lay in the integration of multiple risk structures combined into a deductive method for fast and intuitive user interaction, and a modular architecture. The tool is intended to support neurosurgeons at quickly determining the most appropriate surgical trajectory through the brain matter with minimized risk; the user interface guides the user through the decision making process and helps save planning time of neurosurgical interventions. Risk structures and trajectories can be visualized in an intuitive way, thanks to a 3D brain surgery simulator developed with Unity. A qualitative evaluation with clinical experts shows the practical relevance, while a quantitative performance and functionality analysis proves the robustness and effectiveness of the system with respect to literature.

Abstract We introduce a novel logic-based system for reasoning over data streams, which relies on a framework enabling a tight, fine-tuned interaction between Apache Flink and the $${{\mathcal I}^2}$$ -DLV system. The architecture allows to take advantage from both the powerful distributed stream processing capabilities of Flink and the incremental reasoning capabilities of $${{\mathcal I}^2}$$ -DLV, based on overgrounding techniques. Besides the system architecture, we illustrate the supported input language and its modeling capabilities, and discuss the results of an experimental activity aimed at assessing the viability of the approach.

We present ${{{{$\mathscr{I}$}-}\textsc{dlv}}+{{$\mathscr{MS}$}}}$ , a new answer set programming (ASP) system that integrates an efficient grounder, namely ${{{$\mathscr{I}$}-}\textsc{dlv}}$ , with an automatic selector that inductively chooses a solver: depending on some inherent features of the instantiation produced by ${{{$\mathscr{I}$}-}\textsc{dlv}}$ , machine learning techniques guide the selection of the most appropriate solver. The system participated in the latest (7th) ASP competition, winning the regular track, category SP (i.e., one processor allowed).

Abstract The W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a powerful knowledge representation formalism at the basis of many semantic-centric applications. Since its unrestricted usage makes reasoning undecidable already in case of very simple tasks, expressive yet decidable fragments have been identified. Among them, we focus on OWL 2 RL, which offers a rich variety of semantic constructors, apart from supporting all RDFS datatypes. Although popular Web resources - such as DBpedia - fall in OWL 2 RL, only a few systems have been designed and implemented for this fragment. None of them, however, fully satisfy all the following desiderata: (i) being freely available and regularly maintained; (ii) supporting query answering and SPARQL queries; (iii) properly applying the sameAs property without adopting the unique name assumption; (iv) dealing with concrete datatypes. To fill the gap, we present DaRLing, a freely available Datalog rewriter for OWL 2 RL ontological reasoning under SPARQL queries. In particular, we describe its architecture, the rewriting strategies it implements, and the result of an experimental evaluation that demonstrates its practical applicability.

Abstract The repeated execution of reasoning tasks is desirable in many applicative scenarios, such as stream reasoning and event processing. When using answer set programming in such contexts, one can avoid the iterative generation of ground programs thus achieving a significant payoff in terms of computing time. However, this may require some additional amount of memory and/or the manual addition of operational directives in the declarative knowledge base at hand. We introduce a new strategy for generating series of monotonically growing propositional programs. The proposedovergrounded programs with tailoring(OPTs) can be updated and reused in combination with consecutive inputs. With respect to earlier approaches, ourtailored simplificationtechnique reduces the size of instantiated programs. A maintained OPT slowly grows in size from an iteration to another while the update cost decreases, especially in later iterations. In this paper we formally introduce tailored embeddings, a family of equivalence-preserving ground programs which are at the theoretical basis of OPTs and we describe their properties. We then illustrate an OPT update algorithm and report about our implementation and its performance.

Abstract Magic sets are a Datalog to Datalog rewriting technique to optimize query answering. The rewritten program focuses on a portion of the stable model(s) of the input program which is sufficient to answer the given query. However, the rewriting may introduce new recursive definitions, which can involve even negation and aggregations, and may slow down program evaluation. This paper enhances the magic set technique by preventing the creation of (new) recursive definitions in the rewritten program. It turns out that the new version of magic sets is closed for Datalog programs with stratified negation and aggregations, which is very convenient to obtain efficient computation of the stable model of the rewritten program. Moreover, the rewritten program is further optimized by the elimination of subsumed rules and by the efficient handling of the cases where binding propagation is lost. The research was stimulated by a challenge on the exploitation of Datalog/dlv for efficient reasoning on large ontologies. All proposed techniques have been hence implemented in the dlv system, and tested for ontological reasoning, confirming their effectiveness.

Abstract Repeated executions of reasoning tasks for varying inputs are necessary in many applicative settings, such as stream reasoning. In this context, we propose an incremental grounding approach for the answer set semantics. We focus on the possibility of generating incrementally larger ground logic programs equivalent to a given non-ground one; so calledovergrounded programscan be reused in combination with deliberately many different sets of inputs. Updating overgrounded programs requires a small effort, thus making the instantiation of logic programs considerably faster when grounding is repeated on a series of inputs similar to each other. Notably, the proposed approach works “under the hood”, relieving designers of logic programs from controlling technical aspects of grounding engines and answer set systems. In this work we present the theoretical basis of the proposed incremental grounding technique, we illustrate the consequent repeated evaluation strategy and report about our experiments.

Abstract Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a purely declarative formalism developed in the field of logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning: computational problems are encoded by logic programs whose answer sets, corresponding to solutions, are computed by an ASP system. Different, semantically equivalent, programs can be defined for the same problem; however, performance of systems evaluating them might significantly vary. We propose an approach for automatically transforming an input logic program into an equivalent one that can be evaluated more efficiently. One can make use of existing tree-decomposition techniques for rewriting selected rules into a set of multiple ones; the idea is to guide and adaptively apply them on the basis of proper new heuristics, to obtain a smart rewriting algorithm to be integrated into an ASP system. The method is rather general: it can be adapted to any system and implement different preference policies. Furthermore, we define a set of new heuristics tailored at optimizing grounding, one of the main phases of the ASP computation; we use them in order to implement the approach into the ASP system DLV , in particular into its grounding subsystem ℐ-DLV , and carry out an extensive experimental activity for assessing the impact of the proposal.

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established declarative problem solving paradigm which became widely used in AI and recognized as a powerful tool for knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR), especially for its high expressiveness and the ability to deal also with incomplete knowledge.