IJCAR Preface

This issue contains a selection of papers presented at the Third International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning (IJCAR 2006) on August 17–20, 2006, in Seattle, Washington, as part of the Federated Logic Conferences (FLoC 2006). The IJCAR series of conferences aims at unifying the different research disciplines within automated reasoning. One could also see this endeavor as an attempt at reunification, because in the ’80s there was a strong opinion that research in automated deduction, as presented in the main deduction conference CADE, was dominated by resolution-based approaches and as a consequence, other subdisciplines created their own workshops and conferences. Nowadays, we see the field of automated reasoning spread across events such as CADE (automated deduction), FTP (first-order theorem proving), KR (knowledge representation), LPAR (logic programming and automated reasoning), LPNMR (logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning), RTA (term rewriting), TABLEAUX (tableau calculi), and TPHOLs (higher order); and additionally there are papers on automated reasoning in various general AI conferences such as IJCAI, ECAI, and JELIA. Since 2001 an attempt has been made to join conferences by organizing the International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning. IJCAR 2006 was the third event in this series and was the fusion of several major conferences: