Comment on RIF-PRD

The time is ripe for a W3C standard for rules and RIF looks to me to  
be a very good proposal, building on the experience of previous work  
on SWRL and RuleML, among other initiatives.   I particularly like its  
modular structure and its extensibility using FLD.  It remains to be  
seen whether FLD will be expressive enough for requirements in the  
legal domain, for defining a dialect capable of modeling legislation  
in an "isomorphic" way, which is important for both validating and  
maintaining the models.  In a three year European project, ESTRELLA,  
which ended in 2008, we developed a rule interchange language for  
models of legislation, called the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format  
(LKIF) expressly for this purpose. We may have built LKIF on top of  
RIF had it been available at the time.  It may be an interesting task  
to see if LKIF could be reconstructed as a RIF dialect using FLD.

One nitpick:  RIF, like SWRL before it,  define a bunch of "builtin"  
predicate and function symbols.   I would have much preferred a more  
general and extensible method for attaching procedures, defined using  
existing programming langauges.

____________________________
Dr. Thomas F. Gordon
Fraunhofer FOKUS
Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 31
10589 Berlin, Germany
thomas.gordon@fokus.fraunhofer.de
Tel: +49 30 3463 7219
Mobil: +49 170 290 7532

Received on Tuesday, 11 August 2009 21:08:24 UTC