Knowledge of Uncertain Worlds: Programming with Logical Constraints

TL;DR

This paper introduces DA logic, a unified programming language that handles recursion, negation, and uncertainty in logic programming, enabling flexible and consistent reasoning across different semantics.

Contribution

It presents DA logic, a novel language based on founded and constraint semantics, supporting meta-constraints and uncertain information for more robust logic programming.

Findings

Supports undefined and possible value combinations

Enables instantiation with new predicates and arguments

Provides a unified framework for conflicting semantics

Abstract

Programming with logic for sophisticated applications must deal with recursion and negation, which together have created significant challenges in logic, leading to many different, conflicting semantics of rules. This paper describes a unified language, DA logic, for design and analysis logic, based on the unifying founded semantics and constraint semantics, that support the power and ease of programming with different intended semantics. The key idea is to provide meta-constraints, supports the use of uncertain information in the form of either undefined values or possible combinations of values or both, and promote the use of knowledge units that can be instantiated by any new predicates, including predicates with additional arguments.