In the last few years, several studies have emphasized the use of ontologies as an alternative to organization of the information.
The notion of ontology has become popular in fields such as intelligent information integration, information retrieval on the Internet,…

The Semantic Web purports to give computeraccessible meaning to the content of the World Wide Web. The rationale behind this project is to create an environment where all this information could be freely exchanged among diverse entities, yet retaining its…

Modeling is one of the most important activities throughout any software development life cycle. Within object-oriented modeling, class generalization is a powerful, yet simple concept for abstracting commonalities between classes. Although, as classes evolved in the model, their semantics may…

Defeasible argumentation is one of the approaches that attempt to address the challenges arising when we reason defeasibly, with several formalisms in the literature reaching a mature state. Nowadays, several of them started shifting their semantics towards a dialectical characterization.…

The development of systems with the ability to reason about change notion and actions has been of great importance for the artificial intelligence community. The definition and implementation of systems capable of managing defeasible, incomplete, unreliable, or uncertain information has…

In the last decade several ways to formalize defeasible reasoning have been studied. A particular approach, defeasible argumentation, has been particularly successful to achieve this goal.
The inference process of argument-based systems is based on the interaction of ar- guments…

In logic programs, negation-as-failure has been used both for representing negative information and for providing default nonmonotonic inference. In this paper we argue that this twofold role is not only unnecessary for the expressiveness of the language, but it also…

SweetDeal is a rule-based approach to representation of business contracts that enables software agents to create, evaluate, negotiate, and execute contracts with substantial automation and modularity. It builds upon the situated courteous logic programs knowledge representation in RuleML, the emerging…

This thesis presents a new approach to building a design for testability (DFT) system. The system takes a digital circuit description, finds out the problems in testing it, and suggests circuit modifications to correct those problems. The key contributions of…

We develop a novel autonomous control synthesis strategy called Phase Space Navigator for the automatic synthesis of nonlinear control systems. The Phase Space Navigator generates global control laws by synthesizing flow shapes of dynamical systems and planning and navigating system…