الفهرس 
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Abstract
In this thesis, we will present work revolving around logic programming, the field deals with the use of logic as a programming language. We aim to provide an alternative framework for logic programming. We view logic programs as inductive definitions rather than first order logic. After going over some of the background material on logic programming, we discuss work about induction, and give induction principles that are richer than mathematical induction, in that they yield shorter, simpler and more elegant proofs. We start by overview work introduced to relate inductive definitions framework to the traditional framework-logic programs as first-order logic that is necessary for a thorough understanding of the future work in this thesis. Then, we will introduce quasi, stratified, disjunctive and general inductive definitions. We describe an inductive definition semantics for logic programs which generalizes the inductive definition semantics defined in [1, 82, 81, 52]. We will show that, within this framework, inductive definitions are natural ways to define the semantics of logic programs. The advantages of this framework are its simplicity, its naturalness, and abundance of applications. The thesis is structured as follows. Chapter 1 is an introduction for the subject. In chapter 2 we present the necessary technical background for understanding the rest of the results. In chapter 3 we introduce several forms of inductive definitions and study several basic properties. We also present the semantics of these forms. In chapter 4, we relate the semantics of normal logic programs to the quasi-inductive definition semantics and the semantics of disjunctive inductive definitions are viewed as an alternative semantics for disjunctive inductive definitions. In chapter 5, we are concerned with the semantics of general logic programs as inductive definitions. Finally conclusions and future work are discussed in the same chapter .