The well-founded semantics is the principle of inductive definition, revisited

In the past, there have been several attempts to explain logic programming under the well-founded semantics as a logic of inductive definitions. A weakness in all is the absence of an obvious connection between how we understand various types of informal inductive definitions in mathematical text and the complex mathematics of the well-founded semantics. In this paper, we close this gap. We formalize the induction process in the most common principles and prove that the well-founded model construction generalizes them all.status: publishe