Technological Contest

The logic programming community has deep theoretical foundations and a well established culture of practice. To meet the present and future needs of AI, however, the need for well-founded and -engineered logic based technologies (LBT) is compelling.

Following the twofold purpose of (i) increasing the visibility of novel LBT with the LP community and (ii) drawing a picture of the current state of the art of LBT, the Italian Group of Logic Programming Users (GULP) is organising a technological contest within the scope of CILC 2022. The contest will accept descriptions of software contributions to be assessed by a pool of experts selected by the GULP.

The experts will then review and assess the submitted descriptions and the corresponding code, selecting the best ones according to a number of objective criteria. The selected technologies will then be presented at CILC 2022, tagged with a DOI (via Zenodo) and mentioned in the post-proceedings of CILC 2022.

At least one author of each accepted technology will be required to attend the workshop (also virtually) to present the contribution.

One award of 200 EUR + conference fees

Any software (no constraint on the programming language of choice) implementing some logic-programming-related facility (e.g. theorem prover, logic reasoner, etc.) or some logic-programming-based tool (e.g. an automated planner).

The only constraints are re-usability and open-sourceness. The submitted software should, in principle, provide some re-usably facility to their intended users. This is meant to avoid single-shot experiments code.

The source code of the technology should be inspectable by any member of the LP community

• A link to the repository hosting the technology’s source code (e.g. link to the Git repository).

• A brief description of the technology, specific for this contest, describing:

  • its purpose
  • its intended user base
  • the functionalities it currently provides (overview + examples)
  • the functionalities it will eventually provide (overview + examples)
  • its license
  • OS/runtimes required for its execution and development (the two may be different)
  • other runtimes it is interoperable with
  • list of references to relevant resources (e.g. papers, talks, online documentation, etc.)

Descriptions shall be submitted in Markdown format.

They may be made available via URLs, linking, e.g., the README.md file of a publicly available Git repository, as well as some Wiki on the technology’s homepage.

Fill the following Google form.

Beware that the form will require the submitted technology’s source code to be accessible from the Web

No later than: 19 June 2022

To keep the comparison among possibly very different technologies fair, the experts’ teams will assess technologies according to inherent aspects of software technologies, such as:

• Functioning: the software runs
• Technical maturity: code quality, clear structuring of the code base, presence of automatic tests, etc.
• Theoretical maturity: adherence to the main scientific literature related with the tool
• Maintainability: use of build automation, version control, continuous integration/delivery tools, etc.
• Interoperability: the software offers APIs to be used by other programming languages (e.g. foreign user interface)
• Portability: how many and which platforms the software runs on
• Documentation: existence of a clear and up-to-date documentation
• Availability: source and/or binaries availability (possibly via standard repository, open source licenses, etc.)
• Impact: how much benefit is the tool expected to bring to the LP community

The various “dimensions” of evaluation are not binary properties but rather have a scale of evaluation. Preliminary contributions are welcome as well!

Expert logic programmers reviewers selected by the GULP members will select the accepted technologies, and then all CILC participants can express the final evaluation after the presentation.