The prime forum in Japan to discuss industrial and commercial applications of Prolog and related advanced software technology.

Presentations from companies including Boeing, Bull, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi Electric, Mitsubishi Chemical, NTT Data, NedCar-Volvo, Siemens and many leading universities cover applications in the automotive, railway, aircraft, electric appliances, chemical, telecommunications, information processing and internet industries and show how advanced software technology is put to work in mainstream business.

INAP caters to a critical and demanding audience of practitioners in industry and academia. The one-track conference combines technical presentations of current research, a rich set of tutorials mostly from industry, and two visionary talks by Karl Reed and Paul Tarau.

Full commercial services, parallel exhibition, continuous poster & internet exhibition, easy access to the speakers allow for effective communication with a well focussed group of active and passive participants.

Invited Talk: A Vision for Software Engineering

Karl Reed La Trobe University, Australia Towards an Engineering Discipline ...The Nature of Software Engineering, Problems, Futures and Directions

Karl Reed is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at La Trobe University, where he is Director of the AAITP, a multi-million dollar research program in to CASE and Hypertext.

He was recently appointed a Distinguished Business Associate in the Faculty of Business at Swinbourne University of Technology. A Fellow of the Institution of Engineers, Australia, and a Fellow and Honorary Life member of the Australian Computer Society, he uses his 32 years of experience in the IT professions, including 20 in academia as an outspoken Software Engineering pioneer and industry advocate.

He is a pioneer of SE education in Australia and has served on the program committees of ICSE and IWCASE, the latter as Program Committee Co-chair. He is the current President of the IWCASE Board. In 1986, he spent his study leave working with Prof. Vic Basili and Dr. Dieter Rombach on the TAME project at the University of Maryland. Among his contributions, he includes being an initiator of the Asian Pacific Software Engineering Conference and a member of its Steering Committee. He was also responsible for ICSE being held in Australia in 1992. He has held teaching positions at Monash Computer Centre, RMIT and now at La Trobe University. He has 20 years experience as an industry advocate and ACS spokesperson of industry policy (an area where he has taught at the Singapore Institute of Management, and held the position of Senior Visiting Fellow in Industry Policy at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology). He is also Director of the ACS Technical Board (Computer Systems and Software Engineering), and Consultant Editor to Computer Week.

He holds an undergraduate qualification in engineering from RMIT, and a Master's Degree (by research) from Monash University Clayton.

What he talks....

Towards an Engineering Discipline ...The Nature of Software Engineering, Problems, Futures and Directions

This speculative work considers traditional engineering disciplines as a model for software engineering. It is argued that the properties of such disciplines are identifiable, and can be compared with the current state of software development practice and software engineering research. Particular issues are:- the need for prescriptive design, the need for design and implementation methodologies which incorprate both re-use and specification constraints such as performance, reliability, quality etc, the need for improved diagramming systems, the issue of higher-order and hence more tractable formal methods, the precise nature of design-products (i.e documentation etc.) which are actually used and are useful.

This is philosophical work, monitoring developments in the field, andtesting them against this goal. It has lead to suggestions for extensions to traditional research agendas.

Keynote Speech: A Vision for Internet Groupware

Paul Tarau University of Moncton, Canada Logic Programming and Virtual Worlds

Paul Tarau holds a PhD from Universite de Montreal and is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Universite de Moncton, Canada. He is the author of BinProlog, a high performance continuation passing Prolog system. He has worked on compilation of logic programs, translation from Prolog to C, program transformations and logic grammars. Recently, he has developed LogiMOO system, a BinProlog based Virtual World for live interaction and collaborative work on the INTERNET.

What he talks....

Logic Programming and Virtual Worlds

"Moondo" by Intel, "Worlds" by Worlds Inc., "Cyber Passage" by Sony are just some of the emerging Virtual World technology based groupware tools. Their industrial potential is enormous as they are the most natural way to `virtualize' organizations by reusing operational knowledge of their members through simple metaphors. We show that logic programming can provide similar functionality and cooperate smoothly with specialized tools in a multi-paradigm environment. Centered around the use of LogiMOO, a very high level kernel for INTERNET collaborative work, the talk explains how to build distributed applications in a logic programming language featuring Linda-based coordination libraries and how sophisticated agent programming and live interaction is programmed in a few lines of Prolog. Embedded in a multiparadigm/multi-platform framework through use of standard tools like Netscape 3.0, CGI-programming andindependently designed VRML 2.0 based 3-D worlds, LogiMOO closes the gap between logic programming languages and real life INTERNET programming. We highlight its potential for industrial applications by describing the use of LogiMOO as advanced groupware.

Tutorials

Exploiting Advanced Software The INAP Tutorials give a rare opportunity to catch up with emerging technologies and their industrial use. Covered are the Internet, Agents, Advanced Languages, Problem Solving and Software Engineering. The speakers are distinguished experts who agreed to present easy to understand for a general audience interested in the practical application of advanced software technologies.

Erlang - a survey of the language and its industrial applications
Joe Armstrong,
Ericsson, Sweden  

Finite Domain Constraint Solving in Constraint Logic Programming
Philippe Codognet,
INRIA - Rocquencourt, France

LogicWeb: Enhancing the Web with Logic Programming
Andrew Davison,
Prince of Songkla University, Thailand  

Mercury - a declarative programming language for industrial-strength
applications 
Fergus Henderson,
The University of Melbourne, Australia  

April - An Agent Programming Language for the Internet
Francis G. McCabe,
Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., Japan

Constraint-Based Reasoning Applied to Engineering Design
Niall Murtagh,
Mitsubishi Electric, Japan 

Application of SRI Open Agent Architecture to Information Retrieval
Hiroki "Hammer" Ohama,
NTT Data Corporation, Japan  

Boosting the quality and maintainability of Prolog applications by new
static analysis techniques. 
Gerd Venzl, Karl Stroetmann, Martin Mueller,
Siemens AG Corporate R&D, Germany  

Paper and Poster Presentations

Prolog Visualization Based on Attribute Graph Grammer 
Yoshihiro Adachi, Takanori Imaki, Suguru Kobayashi, 
Toyo University, Japan 

Constraint Logic Implementation of a Decision Support
System for Transportation Planning
Cristina Baboescu,
The University of Electro-Communications, 
(Railway Technical Research Institute), Japan 

The ECLiPSe HTTP-Library
Stephane Bressan,
MIT, USA,
Philippe Bonnet,
Bull, France  

Datamining in a vehicle configuration system using Prolog
Affiliation of Virginia Dignum, Origin/Eindhoven AFM I BV., Netherlands 
Jan van der Vorst, NedCar BV., Netherlands, 
Frank Dignum,
Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands  

Economic Modelling using Constraint Logic Programming
Nelson Donovon, David Gilbert,
City University, United Kingdom 

Distributed Support for Integrated Building Design and Construction 
Robin Drogemuller,
James Cook University, Australia, 
Oskar Bartenstein,
IF Computer, Japan  

ACE/Controlled English for executable specifications 
Norbert Fuchs, Rolf Schwitter,
University of Zurich, Switzerland  

View update by Query Analysis 
Ryuichi Hoshi, Osamu Yoshie,
Science University of Tokyo, Japan  

Tree Drawing by Constraints Logic Programming 
Takanori Imaki, Yoshihiro Adachi, Kensei Tsuchida, Takeo Yaku,
Toyo University, Japan  

A system to support learning Prolog with templates and examples
Kohji Itoh,
Science University of Tokyo  

Timetabling in Constraint Logic Programming 
Maria Kambi, David Gilbert,
City University, United Kingdom  

Learning Biomedical Patterns 
Gabriella Kokai,
University of Erlangen-Nurnberg, Germany, 
Zoltan Alexin,
Jozsef Attila University, Hungary,
Tibor Gymothy, 
Hungarian Academy of Sciences  

Proof Planning & Configuration
Helen Lowe,
Napier University, Scotland,
Michal Pechoucek, 
Alan Bundy,
University of Edinburgh, Scotland  

Mass Change of On-line Textual Databases using Natural Language Processing
Leo Obrst, K. Nanda Jha, Gary Coen,
Boeing Helicopters, USA  

Prolog Implementation of PROGOL based on Bottom-up 
Computation 
Tomonobu Ozaki, Koichi Furukawa,
Keio University, Japan  

Transient Analysis and Synthesis of Linear Circuits using 
Constraint Logic Programming 
Archana Shankar, David Gilbert and Michael Jampel, 
City University, United Kingdom  

Production Scheduling System introducing CSP of operator's skill 
Masayoshi Takada,
Mitsubishi Chemical, Japan  

A WAM Model for a Linear Logic Programming Language 
Naoyuki Tamura, Yukio Kaneda,
Kobe University, Japan  

How to Distribute Prolog Knowledge for Car Traffic 
Simulation 
Harold Trannois, Jean-Luc Deleage, Thierry Capitaine, Andre Lebrun,
CURASI, LITP-IBP, France