ASP at Work: Spin-off and Applications of the DLV System

• Published in: Logic Programming, Knowledge Representation, and Nonmonotonic Reasoning pp. 432 - 451
• Main Authors: Grasso, Giovanni, Leone, Nicola, Manna, Marco, Ricca, Francesco
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2011
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Applications; ASP; DLV System; Knowledge Management
• ISBN: 3642208312; 9783642208317
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-20832-4_27

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative language for knowledge representation and reasoning. After its proposal, in a seminal paper by Michael Gelfond and Vladimir Lifschitz dated in 1988, ASP has been the subject of a broad theoretical research-work, ranging from linguistic extensions and semantic properties to evaluation algorithm and optimization techniques. Later on, the availability of a number of efficient systems made ASP a powerful tool for the fast development of knowledge-based applications. In this paper, we report on the ongoing effort aimed at the industrial exploitation of DLV – one of the most popular ASP systems – in the area of Knowledge Management. Two spin-off companies of University of Calabria are involved in such an exploitation: Dlvsystem Srl and Exeura Srl. They have specialized DLV into some Knowledge Management products for Text Classification, Information Extraction, and Ontology Representation and Reasoning, which have allowed to develop a number of successful real-world applications.