Several group members are involved in the MEDLAR-II project (an ESPRIT
Basic Research Project, nr. 6471, being financed by the Austrian
Science Foundation as long as Austria is not a full member of the
European Union). This project, whose acronym stands for "MEchanising
Deduction in Logics of Practical Reasoning" (in the acronym,
"Practical" is rendered as "A"), is the successor project of MEDLAR
(ESPRIT BRA 3125), which ran from November 1989 until May
1992. MEDLAR-II started in July 1992 (for the RISC group, due to an
extra approval round of the Austrian Science Foundation, FWF, only in
November 1992) and will run for three years.
The ultimate goals of the MEDLAR-II project are:
- the synthesis of specific reasoning capabilities like abduction,
analogy, planning, and model building, in a given combination of
logics;
- the development of the general framework (LDS, labelled
deductive systems) to produce the specific reasoning capabilities;
- exploration of the architecture for specialisation,
implementation and integration of these higher-level reasoning
capabilities in a generic practical reasoning agent.
In the MEDLAR-II project, RISC cooperates with many partners from
(mostly) EU-countries. The partner institutions are: Imperial College,
London, UK (the project leaders); ICL, Bracknell, UK; IRIT, Universite
Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France; LIFIA, Grenoble, France; ONERA-CERT,
Toulouse, France; Max-Planck-Institut fuer Informatik, Saarbruecken,
Germany; Technische Hochschule, Darmstadt, Germany; Technische
Universitaet, Muenchen, Germany; Universititet in Oslo, Oslo, Norway;
Universita di Torino, Torino, Italy; Universita La Sapienza, Roma,
Italy; University of Leeds, Leeds, UK; Agder College, Kristiansand,
Norway; University of Uppsala, Uppsala, Sweden; and, as associate
member, the Australian National University, at Canberra, Australia.
The tasks involving RISC are:
- I.3 (Rob): Logical Phenomena and Reasoning Methods for Robotics
- II.4 (Geom): Geometric and Algebraic Reasoning
- III.1 (Reas): Reasoning with Labelled Deductive Systems
- III.2 (Fnds): Mathematical Foundations of the General Framework
- IV.2 (ICE): Integrating and Combining Engines
- V.2 (RD): Demonstrator of Practical Reasoner for Robotics
Currently, the following members of the Computational Category Theory
working group have contributed or are contributing to MEDLAR-II:
Jochen Pfalzgraf (work on categorical foundations for relational
structures; robotics; combining planning methods with the technology
of logical fiberings), Karel Stokkermans (work on categorical
framework for rewriting and related algorithms; robotics; combining
planning methods with the technology of logical fiberings), Wolfgang
Gehrke (application of rewriting to problems in category theory),
Viorica Sofronie (work on decomposition of logics).
