In this paper we investigate the theoretical foundation of a new bottom-up semantics for
linear logic programs, and more precisely for the fragment of LinLog (Andreoli, 1992) that
consists of the language LO (Andreoli & Pareschi, 1991) enriched with the constant 1. We
use constraints to symbolically and finitely represent possibly infinite collections of provable
goals. We define a fixpoint semantics based on a new operator in the style of TP working
over constraints. An application of the fixpoint operator can be computed algorithmically.
As sufficient conditions for termination, we show that the fixpoint computation is guaranteed
to converge for propositional LO. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to define an
effective fixpoint semantics for linear logic programs. As an application of our framework,
we also present a formal investigation of the relations between LO and Disjunctive Logic
Programming (Minker et al., 1991). Using an approach based on abstract interpretation, we
show that DLP fixpoint semantics can be viewed as an abstraction of our semantics for LO.
We prove that the resulting abstraction is correct and complete (Cousot & Cousot, 1977;
Giacobazzi & Ranzato, 1997) for an interesting class of LO programs encoding Petri Nets.