  Repeated executions of reasoning tasks for varying inputs are necessary in
many applicative settings, such as stream reasoning. In this context, we
propose an incremental grounding approach for the answer set semantics. We
focus on the possibility of generating incrementally larger ground logic
programs equivalent to a given non-ground one; so called overgrounded programs
can be reused in combination with deliberately many different sets of inputs.
Updating overgrounded programs requires a small effort, thus making the
instantiation of logic programs considerably faster when grounding is repeated
on a series of inputs similar to each other. Notably, the proposed approach
works "under the hood", relieving designers of logic programs from controlling
technical aspects of grounding engines and answer set systems. In this work we
present the theoretical basis of the proposed incremental grounding technique,
we illustrate the consequent repeated evaluation strategy and report about our
experiments. This paper is under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic
Programming (TPLP).
