We present SLDNFA, an extension of SLDNF-resolution for abductive reasoning on abductive logic programs. SLDNFA solves the floundering abduction problem: non-ground abductive atoms can be selected. SLDNFA provides also a partial solution for the floundering negation problem. Different abductive answers can be derived from an SLDNFA-refutation; these answers provide different compromises between generality and comprehensibility. Two extensions of SLDNFA are proposed which satisfy stronger completeness results. The soundness of SLDNFA and its extensions is proven. Their completeness for minimal solutions with respect to implication, cardinality and set inclusion is investigated. The formalisation of SLDNFA presented here is an update of an older version presented in [13] and does not rely on skolemisation of abductive atoms. 1

Integrity constraints are very useful in many contexts, such as, for example, deductive databases, abductive and inductive logic programming. However, fully testing the integrity constraints after each update or modification can be very expensive and methods have been developed which simplify the integrity constraints. In this paper, we pursue the goal of writing this simplification procedure as a meta-program in logic programming and then using partial deduction to obtain pre-compiled integrity checks for certain update patterns. We argue that the ground representation has to be used to write this metaprogram declaratively. We however also show that, contrary to what one might expect, current partial deduction techniques are then unable to specialise this meta-interpreter in an interesting way and no pre-compilation of integrity checks can be obtained. In fact, we show that partial deduction (alone) is not able to perform any (sophisticated) specialisation at the object-level for meta...

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