Abstract The seaport of Gioia Tauro is the largest transshipment terminal of the Mediterranean coast. A crucial management task for the companies operating in the seaport is team-building: the problem of properly allocating the available personnel for serving the incoming ships. Teams have to be carefully arranged in order to meet several constraints, such as allocation of employees with appropriate skills, fair distribution of the working load, and turnover of the heavy/dangerous roles. This makes team-building a hard and expensive task requiring several hours of manual preparation per day. In this paper we present a system based on Answer Set Programming for the automatic generation of the teams of employees in the seaport of Gioia Tauro. The system is currently exploited in the Gioia Tauro seaport by ICO BLG, a company specialized in automobile logistics.

Abstract This article considers the problem of reasoning on massive amounts of (possibly distributed) data. Presently, existing proposals show some limitations: (i) the quantity of data that can be handled contemporarily is limited, because reasoning is generally carried out in main-memory; (ii) the interaction with external (and independent) Database Management Systems is not trivial and, in several cases, not allowed at all; and (iii) the efficiency of present implementations is still not sufficient for their utilization in complex reasoning tasks involving massive amounts of data. This article provides a contribution in this setting; it presents a new system, called DLVDB, which aims to solve these problems. Moreover, it reports the results of a thorough experimental analysis we have carried out for comparing our system with several state-of-the-art systems (both logic and databases) on some classical deductive problems; the other tested systems are LDL++, XSB, Smodels, and three top-level commercial Database Management Systems. DLVDB significantly outperforms even the commercial database systems on recursive queries.

Information extraction technologies meet the market need for automatic tools for extracting semi-structured information from Web pages. However, pages may change over time due to different reasons, ranging from restyling pages to on-purpose modifications brought about into pages in order to puzzle Web wrappers. In this paper we deal with this latter scenario, by studying the issue of on-purpose wrapper spoiling and its relationship to wrapping. We present an architecture and a tool implementing a wrapper spoiling system, and discuss some practical spoiling techniques which are also experimentally tested

The task of an information integration system is to combine data residing at different sources, providing the user with a unified view of them, called global schema. Users formulate queries over the global schema, and the system suitably queries the sources, providing an answer to the user, who is not obliged to have any information about the sources. Recent developments in IT such as the expansion of the Internet and the World Wide Web, have made available to users a huge number of information sources, generally autonomous, heterogeneous and widely distributed: as a consequence, information integration has emerged as a crucial issue in many application domains, e.g., distributed databases, cooperative information systems, data warehousing, or on-demand computing. Recent estimates view information integration to be a $10 Billion market by 2006 [14].