University of Calabria has an experienced group of computer scientists comprising six Full Professors, and a large number of Associate Professors and Senior Researchers. This project will be done by the group working on Databases and Artificial Intelligence (DBAI) which mainly belongs to the Department of Mathematics. The members of this group have a wide experience in the area of computational logics and deductive databases. They have had key roles in several national and international projects in this area, including the ESPRIT projects KIWI, EDS, and KIWIS. They leaded the teams which developed advanced
knowledge-base systems, like COMPLEX [44], KIWIS [61], and DLV [35] which is the state-of-the-art
implementation of disjunctive deductive databases. The quality of the research results achieved at University of Calabria in this area is witnessed by numerous publications in top-level scientific conferences and journals in the field (see the curricula below). University of Calabria is the Coordinator of the area “Logic-based databases” of the ESPRIT Network of Excellence Compulog Net, and was the Coordinator of the Area 5 ”Advanced Database Systems” of the Italian National Research Council program on ”Information Systems and Parallel Computing from 1990 to 1995.

Key Persons
The following members of the University of Calabria will be the key persons involved in the project team,
that will be leaded by Nicola Leone.

Nicola Leone received the degree in Mathematics from the University of Calabria in Italy. In June 1986,
he joined CRAI (an industrial consortium for computer science research and application at Rende, Italy),
where he worked until December 1991. From January 1992 to September 1995, he was with the ISI institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). From October 1995 to September 2000, he was a professor of database systems at the Information Systems Department of the Vienna University of Technology. Since October 2000, he is a full professor of computer science in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Calabria. He has participated in several international projects, mainly on the development of advanced data and data and knowledge bases, including the ESPRIT projects KIWIS (No. 2424) and EDS. He is the leader of the team that has built the knowledge base system DLV, the state-of-the-art implementation of disjunctive database systems. His main research interests are in the areas of knowledge representation, database theory, nonmonotonic reasoning, algorithms and computational complexity, computational logics and deductive databases. He is author of more than 100 papers published in conference proceedings, books, and scientific journals, including Journal of the ACM, Information and Computation, JCSS, AI Journal, ACM Transactions, IEEE Transactions, APAL, TCS, and JLP. He served on the program committees of several international conferences and has also been the Program Chair of LPNMR ’99, he is Guest Editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal, and member of the Steering Committee of LPNMR.

Pasquale Rullo is a full professor of Computer Science in the Department of Mathematics at the University
of Calabria, Italy. In 1980 he joined CRAI, a research and application centre in Computer Science,
where he headed the research division. From 1992 to 1994 he was an associate professor at the University
of Calabria and, from 1994 to 1997, he worked as a full professor in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Reggio Calabria. Recently, he has served as a visiting researcher at the International Computer
Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley. He has worked on database design for many years and his current
interests are in the area of deductive databases, knowledge representation, nonmonotonic reasoning, and
Knowledge Management. He has published several papers in refereed journals (Information and Computation, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Journal of Logic Programming, Logic and Computation, etc.) and conference proceedings. He has participated to several projects sponsored by the European Economic Community and the Italian Research Council, including the ESPRIT projects KIWI and KIWIS, where he was team leader.