Golog is a powerful programming language for logic-based agents. The primitives of the language are actions whose preconditions and effects are defined in a Situation Calculus action theory using first-order logic. To describe possible courses of actions the programmer can freely combine imperative control structures with constructs for non-deterministic choice, leaving it to the system to resolve the non-determinism in a suitable manner. Golog has been successfully used for high-level decision making in the area of cognitive robotics. Obviously, it is important to verify certain properties of a Golog program before executing it on a physical robot. However, due to the high expressiveness of the language the verification problem is in general undecidable. In this thesis, we study the verification problem for Golog programs over actions defined in action languages based on Description Logics and explore the boundary between decidable and undecidable fragments.

Aus der Einleitung: Description Logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation formalisms that are successfully applied in many application domains. They provide the logical foundation for the Direct Semantics of the standard web ontology language OWL2. The light-weight DL EL, underlying the OWL2 EL profile, is of particular interest since all common reasoning problems are polynomial in this logic, and it is used in many prominent biomedical ontologies like SNOMEDCT and the Gene Ontology.

It has not been my aim to provide conclusive evidence for or against anyone hypothesis regarding Time and Tense. I have simply attempted to collect together and collate much of what has been written on the topic of tense in English, in order to show what the current trends of thought are. In Chapter One I presented a brief survey of some of the more basic notions associated with time and tense, in order to provide a background for the more linguistic approach to follow. I therefore examined such issues as the difference between time and tense, the problem of the passage and directionality of time, of the present moment, time and space , tense as a universal, "and various features of tense systems. I sketched Bull's system of scalars, vectors and axes as representative of our English tense system. Chapter Two dealt with time and logic, but as I am a mere layman in matters logical, I refrained from discussing any individual logical system in depth, and rather discussed various problems which appear to confront the logician in formulating a tensed or tenseless logic. This chapter aimed at providing a better understanding of the linguistic issues to follow, for time and logic are intimately connected with language. Chapter Three was more linguistically oriented, and in it I attempted to provide a broad outline of the development of thoughts about tense before the Transformationalist period (pre 1960). Because of the vast scope involved, I had, perforce, to be brief at times. I gave attention to tense in classical grammatical studies, and summarized how it was seen from about 1500 to 1800. I gave more detailed treatment to the twentieth century, focussing specifically on grammarians like Jespersen (1933), Twaddell (1960), Ota (1963), Palmer (1965) and others - all, writers typical of the structuralist era. At the end of Chapter Three I provided an overall summary of ideas on the main tenses by the end of the structuralist period - ideas which were to change radically within the next few years. In Chapter Four I discussed the ideas of tense of some of the main transformationalist/generativists - Diver (1964), Crystal (1966), Huddlestone (1968), Gallagher (1970), McCawley (1971) and Seuren (1974), in an attempt to show how theories on tense were becoming increasingly abstract, and how most data indicated that it is highly probable that tense is an abstract higher predicate of the sentence in which it appears in surface structure, closely related to temporal adverbs. Chapter Five continued in the same vein. I tried to show, using syntactic tests, that tense is a higher predicate, and used arguments involving Conjunction Reduction (based on Kiparsky (1968)), VP Constituency, Sequence of Tense, Pronominalization, and Quantification. In Chapter Six I focussed more closely on tense-time adverbials, in order to show that they have the same syntactic properties as tense, are also probably deep superordinate predicates, and are closely related to tense. My suggestion was that either tense is derived from temporal adverbs or vice versa, as this would simplify the grammar. The derivation procedures at the end of the chapter (6.8) were largely based on Hausmann (1971). I made no detailed reference to extralinguistic matters which affect tenses, in this study - such factors as are diScussed by G. Lakoff (1971) (presuppositions and relative well-formedness) and by R. Lakoff (1975). Tense is not a matter of pure Structuralism, just as language is not - extralinguistic factors ought to be accounted for before any study can claim to be conclusive. For this reason I do not in any way claim to have made an exhaustive study of time and tense - I have simply attempted to summarize and coordinate thoughts on the subject, and to suggest tentatively that the most adequate grammar of English would probably derive tense from underlying temporal adverbs.

The SAP HANA database extends the scope of traditional database engines as it supports data models beyond regular tables, e.g. text, graphs or hierarchies. Moreover, SAP HANA also provides developers with a more fine-grained control to define their database application logic, e.g. exposing specific operators which are difficult to express in SQL. Finally, the SAP HANA database implements efficient communication to dedicated client applications using more effective communication mechanisms than available with standard interfaces like JDBC or ODBC. These features of the HANA database are complemented by the extended scripting engine–an application server for server-side JavaScript applications–that is tightly integrated into the query processing and application lifecycle management. As a result, the HANA platform offers more concise models and code for working with the HANA platform and provides superior runtime performance. This paper describes how these specific capabilities of the HANA platform can be consumed and gives a holistic overview of the HANA platform starting from query modeling, to the deployment, and efficient execution. As a distinctive feature, the HANA platform integrates most steps of the application lifecycle, and thus makes sure that all relevant artifacts stay consistent whenever they are modified. The HANA platform also covers transport facilities to deploy and undeploy applications in a complex system landscape.

We investigate ontology-based query answering (OBQA) in a setting where both the ontology and the query can refer to concrete values such as numbers and strings. In contrast to previous work on this topic, the built-in predicates used to compare values are not restricted to being unary. We introduce restrictions on these predicates and on the ontology language that allow us to reduce OBQA to query answering in databases using the so-called combined rewriting approach. Though at first sight our restrictions are different from the ones used in previous work, we show that our results strictly subsume some of the existing first-order rewritability results for unary predicates. / This is an extended version of a paper published in the proceedings of IJCAI 2017.

Il rapporto del giovane Heidegger con Duns Scoto viene analizzato con particolare riferimento alla tesi del 1916 "La dottrina delle categorie e del significato in Duns Scoto". Il pensatore scolastico viene indicato come fonte di primaria importanza per lo sviluppo dell'ontologia heideggeriana matura attraverso alcuni elementi chiave: l'univocità del concetto di essere, la razionalità di principio dell'individuo, la ricerca di un linguaggio descrittivo adatto alla filosofia. Carl Braig risulta uno degli autori il cui contributo determinò maggiormente in Heidegger l'interesse per i problemi dell'ontologia scotista. / The young Heidegger’s relationship to Duns Scotus is analysed with particular reference to the thesis on “Duns Scotus’s Doctrine of Categories and Meaning” (1916). The scholastic thinker is shown to be a source of primary importance for Heidegger’s mature ontology by the means of some key features: the univocity of the concept of Being, the basic intelligibility of the individual, the search for a descriptive language suitable for philosophy. Carl Braig turns out to be one of the authors who contributed the most to determine Heidegger’s interest in the problems of scotist ontology.