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

Giovanni Grasso, Nicola Leone, Marco Manna, Francesco Ricca

Abstract: 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.