Fostering the Use of Declarative Formalisms for Real-World Applications: The EmbASP Framework

Thanks to a number of efficient implementations, the use of logic formalisms for problem-solving has been increased in several real-world domains. This is the case, for instance, of action languages, such as planning domain definition language (PDDL), or answer set programming (ASP), which is a well-established declarative problem-solving paradigm that became widely used in AI and recognized as a powerful tool for knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR). As the application scenarios widened, the need for proper development tools and interoperability mechanisms for easing interaction and integration between declarative logic-based systems and external systems clearly emerged. In this work, we present a framework for integrating the KRR capabilities of, possibly more than one, declarative formalisms into generic applications developed by means of different programming paradigms. We show the use of the framework by illustrating proper specializations for two formalisms, namely ASP and PDDL, along with specializations for some relevant systems over different platforms, including the mobile setting.