Temporal annotated constraint logic programming with multiple theories

Abstract

The paper aims at building a framework that provides basic operators, with a clear semantics, for combining different knowledge bases and allowing the representation and the handling of temporal information. Our approach stems from two separate lines of research: the general studies on meta-level operators on logic programs introduced by Brogi et al. (1993, 1994) and temporal annotated constraint logic programming (TACLP) defined by Fruhwirth (1996). We propose a language MuTACLP that integrates the above mentioned approaches. Atoms are annotated with temporal information and such annotations are managed via a constraint theory as in TACLP. Mechanisms for structuring programs and combining separate knowledge bases are provided through meta-level operators. A top-down semantics of MuTACLP is given by exploiting meta-logic.