Prolog is the main language from the Logic Programming community, i.e., from programming languages based on logic. Logic programing is at the center of symbolic AI. With machine learning in general and deep learning in particular the attention shifted away from symbolic AI. Recently Prolog is regaining attention because logic based reasoning is explainable and Prolog based machine learning such as ILP (Inductive Logic Programming) and PLP (Probabilistic Logic Programming) can incorporate prior knowledge and learn human understandable models from relatively small amounts of data. Integrating symbolic and statistical AI is another active research field where Prolog plays an important role. Next to what is recognized as AI, Prolog is actively being used for many tasks such as parsing, security, code validation, code refactoring, test generation, business rule systems, planning (robotics), database access including query planning, etc.

SWI-Prolog is the result of a long standing open source project. It is the most popular and comprehensive implementation of the Prolog programming language. For most of the project's lifespan the lead developer, @JanWielemaker was employed by academic institutions in Amsterdam, the university of Amsterdam, the Vrije universtiteit Amsterdam and CWI, the center for math and computer science of the Netherlands. Many of the systems features have been contributed by academic researchers or have been sponsored by commercial users. As of July 2020 the lead developer started SWI-Prolog Solutions b.v. Currently the primary source of income have been startup companies that payed for enhancements, libraries and proprietary code development.

With the GitHub sponsorship we want to support additional developers to initialize or speedup development. Think about documentation, tutorials, development tools, testing, porting, performance improvements, low-level support for --for example-- probabilistic labels and similar techniques that allow for integration with statistical machine learning, etc. Long time involvement of additional developers should also improve the sustainability of the project.

With the GitHub sponsorship we target organizations that care about SWI-Prolog's sustainability, organizations that care about teaching AI and logic programming (see SWISH and Simply Logical and organizations that want to be associated with in particular explainable AI.