This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management, INAP 2005, held in Fukuoka, Japan, in October 2005.

The papers address all current aspects of declarative programming, constraint processing and knowledge management as well as their use for distributed systems and the Web.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 15th International Conference on Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge M- agement, INAP 2004, and the 18th Workshop on Logic Programming, WLP 2004, which were held jointly in Potsdam, Germany, from March 4th to 6th, 2004. Declarative programming is an advanced paradigm for the modeling and solving of complex problems. This speci?cation method has become more and more attractive in recent years, for example, in the domains of databases, for the processing of natural language, for the modeling and processing of combinatorial problems, and for establishing knowledge-based systems for the Web. The INAP conferences provide a forum for intensive discussions of appli- tions of important technologies around logic programming, constraint problem solving, and closely related advanced software. They comprehensively cover the impact of programmable logic solvers in the Internet society, its underlying te- nologies, and leading-edge applications in industry, commerce, government, and social services. The Workshops on Logic Programming are the annual meeting of the Society for Logic Programming (GLP e.V.). They bring together researchers interested in logic programming, constraint programming, and related areas like databases and arti?cial intelligence. Previous workshops have been held in Germany, A- tria, and Switzerland. Thetopicsoftheselectedpapersofthisyear'sjointconferenceconcentrateon three currently important ?elds: knowledge management and decision support, constraint programming and constraint solving, and declarative programming and Web-based systems.

The 20 revised full papers presented in this book together with 4 section surveys were carefully reviewed and selected from the papers contributed to the 14th International Conference on Applications of Prolog, INAP 2001, held in Tokyo, Japan, in October 2002. The papers are devoted to the four tightly interwoven aspects knowledge acquisition, knowledge management, knowledge processing, and knowledge distribution, all in the context of the World Wide Web; they are organized in topical sections on Web languages and logic, knowlege acquisition and knowledge representation, decision support by advanced logic programming, and Web-knowledge management and data mining. The book is targeted to designers and users of e-business systems and e-government systems, for IT professionals who build such systems, as well as for the wider audience interested in the technical background of knowledge processing for the Web.