English

SWI-Prolog and the Web

Programming Languages 2007-11-07 v1 Symbolic Computation

Abstract

Where Prolog is commonly seen as a component in a Web application that is either embedded or communicates using a proprietary protocol, we propose an architecture where Prolog communicates to other components in a Web application using the standard HTTP protocol. By avoiding embedding in external Web servers development and deployment become much easier. To support this architecture, in addition to the transfer protocol, we must also support parsing, representing and generating the key Web document types such as HTML, XML and RDF. This paper motivates the design decisions in the libraries and extensions to Prolog for handling Web documents and protocols. The design has been guided by the requirement to handle large documents efficiently. The described libraries support a wide range of Web applications ranging from HTML and XML documents to Semantic Web RDF processing. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0711.0917,
  title  = {SWI-Prolog and the Web},
  author = {Jan Wielemaker and Zhisheng Huang and Lourens van der Meij},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0711.0917},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

31 pages, 24 figures and 2 tables. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)

R2 v1 2026-06-21T09:40:26.905Z