Nonmonotonic reasoning in LDL++

Deductive database systems have made major advances on efficient support for nonmonotonic reasoning. A first generation of deductive database systems supported the notion of stratification for programs with negation and set aggregates. Stratification is simple to understand and efficient to implement but it is too restrictive; therefore, a second generation of systems seeks efficient support for more powerful semantics based on notions such as well-founded models and stable models. In this respect, a particularly powerful set of constructs is provided by the recently enhanced LDC++ system that supports (i) monotonic user-defined aggregates, (ii) XY-stratified programs, and (iii) the nondeterministic choice constructs under stable model semantics. This integrated set of primitives supports a terse formulation and efficient implementation for complex computations, such as greedy algorithms and data mining functions, yielding levels of expressive power unmatched by other deductive database systems.