Peter Novak, and Martin Balaz
Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovak Republic

Dear Madame/Sir,

We are Peter Novak, and Martin Balaz, currently PhD students at Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovak Republic. In the September 2003 we applied to CologNET for a financial support for the 3-months study stay at Center of Artificial Intelligence of Faculty of Sciences and Technology at New University of Lisbon, Portugal. This is the report of the content of the already
mentioned study stay. In the following we enclose additional information about the study stay:

Name of the applicant: Peter Novak
Citizenship of the applicant: Slovak
E-mail: pno@aronde.net
Phone: ++421-907-723 548
Postal address: Zvolenska 30, 949 11 Nitra, Slovak Republic

Name of the applicant: Martin Balaz
Citizenship of the applicant: Slovak
E-mail: balaz@ii.fmph.uniba.sk
Phone: ++421-904-421 709
Postal address: Nalepkova 15, 949 01 Nitra, Slovak Republic

Duration of the stay: 1 st October 2003 - 19 th December 2003
Home node: Institute of Informatics, Faculy of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Comenius University, Bratislava
Host node: CENTRIA, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, New University of Lisbon, Portugal

Report

Goals
According to our application for the financial support from CologNET, our primary goal was to deepen our knowledge and understanding of logic programming issues with regard to projects being under the development at CENTRIA.

Project
After our arrival to Lisbon it was decided that our stay will be divided into two stages. The first part was focused on deepening our knowledge
of programming in Prolog systems, particularly SWI Prolog and XSB Prolog. During this part of the stay we worked under the supervision of prof. Carlos Viegas Damasio and prof. Jose Alferes. The time spent on
exercises and problems given to us by our supervisors was very fruitful and we felt, that we gained a good experience in Standard Prolog programming. Later, from November until the end of the stay we joined the project W4, led by prof. Damasio, which aims at developing the tools and libraries for semantic web tasks and issues implemented in Standard Prolog environment (details of the W4 project can be found at http://centria.di.fct.unl.pt/~cd/projectos/w4). We worked mainly on various improvements of non-validating XML 1.0 parser. During this part of the stay we gained a lot of experience with issues arising from XML 1.0/1.1 specification. Because these topics were completely new to us, we consider this part of the stay as the most
valuable and interesting.

Results and future plans
As we already mentioned above, in CENTRIA we received a good education and a lot of valuable insights into the topics of logic programming. During the stay we joined a W4 project, which we consider to be very interesting for us and quite important in the context of
activities of semantic web community. In CENTRIA we met nice people who are together in fact a hard-working team. During the stay we built a basis for future projects, which we hope, will be developed in the close
cooperation between our two nodes. As far as our future plans, we plan to continue to participate on activities in the context of W4 project.