A journey in Computational Logic in Italy

Abstract

This issue reviews the recent work of the Italian research groups, whose activity focuses on the use of methodologies and of techniques that are based on computational logic, a fundamental research area of Artificial Intelligence.The study of computational logic has a long tradition in Italy. GULP (the name of the Italian Association for Logic Programming), with its 25 years of existence, is the oldest national association ever founded on this topic, even older than the international Association for Logic Programming. It was, in fact, founded in 1985, soon raising to the highest international levels and becoming the promoter of initiatives that provided both educational and scientific opportunities to many young researchers.After 2004, researchers realized that the time was mature for opening to neighboring and applicative fields and to start proposing logic programming also as a tool for solving problems of interest to other disciplines. The aim of this special issue is to witness this effort. As such, it complements the survey of the first twenty-five years of existence of GULP, edited by Agostino Dovier and Enrico Pontelli in 2010. The fifteen selected articles, included in the special issue, describe some of the most relevant recent experiences and some of the most promising investigations that were (and are being) carried on in such diverse fields as the (Semantic) Web, the specification and verification of interaction proto- * Corresponding author.