Computer Science
The Computer Science group involves 7 researchers with a PhD and 6 PhD students; the aim is to develop advanced systems that put fundamental research to practical use; the group is coordinated by António Porto.
Researchers with a PhD
António Porto, Armando Matos, Jorge Coelho, Mário Florido, Pedro Vasconcelos, Sandra Alves, Simão Sousa
PhD students
Besik Dundua, Cláudio Amaral, David Pereira, Hugo Simões, Vítor Gonçalves, Vítor Rodrigues
Topics
Declarative Information Systems
We aim to develop declarative methodologies and tools, based on sound semantic principles, to support cost-effective construction and evolution of flexible information systems, featuring:
- an enhanced structured and contextual logic programming platform;
- ever-higher abstraction, expressiveness and conciseness in conceptual queries;
- automated high-level management of database tables;
- generic programming techniques applied to parametric instantiation and display;
- a compositional modular and parametric architecture for services with fine-grained inheritance overriding.
Collaborative Knowledge Management Systems
Existing standards for structured data representation and sharing on the Internet, as the Extensible Markup Language (XML), facilitate data exchange and interoperability. Critical theoretical and practical problems arise from differences and deficiencies in representations of related XML documents, creating barriers to collaborative work and global distribution and expansion of information. Considerable research is currently devoted to the development of tools for syntactic validation, semantic verification and unification of XML formats and documents. Recent achievements at LIACC include XCentric, a constraint logic programming language for declarative XML processing based on the unification of flexible arity terms, and VeriFLog a tool that applies XCentric to verification and automatic correction of content in large websites. [More info]
Linearity
Linearity in definitions is a property that strongly affects programming language performance. We study language design and implementation aiming at a good trade-off between expressivity and efficiency.
