Logic Programming Applications: What Are the Abstractions and Implementations?.

This article presents an overview of applications of logic programming,classifying them based on the abstractions and implementations of logiclanguages that support the applications. The three key abstractions are join,recursion, and constraint. Their essential implementations are for-loops, fixedpoints, and backtracking, respectively. The corresponding kinds of applicationsare database queries, inductive analysis, and combinatorial search,respectively. We also discuss language extensions and programming paradigms,summarize example application problems by application areas, and touch onexample systems that support variants of the abstractions with differentimplementations.