Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Declarative Problem Solving

Knowledge management and knowledge-based intelligence are areas of importance in today's 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, 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* and its extentions and code, for both knowledge representation and reasoning, and declarative problem solving. Many of the results here have never appeared before in book form, and have been organized to appeal to practicing and would-be knowledge engineers wishing to learn more about the subject, in courses or through self-teaching. Topics covered include: building block results for both analyzing and modularly building large programs; correctness proof of various programs; algorithms for computing answer sets of programs; demonstration of the knowledge representation and reasoning ability of AnsProlog* through benchmark examples such as the frame problem, reasoning about actions, inheritance hierarchies, reasoning with priorities, and reasoning with incomplete information; encodings of problem-solving activities such as planning, diagnosis, constraint satisfaction problems, logic puzzles, and combinatorial auctions; and descriptions of systems that implement AnsProlog* and its extentions and code of various examples in the syntax of these systems. A comprehensive bibliography rounds off the book.