comments on W3C RIF: very good job overall; next steps on expressiveness

Dear RIF Working Group,

In regard to the announcement of RIF as now having achieved W3C Proposed Recommendation status (see Sandro's message appended below), here are some comments about RIF overall, in support of its moving to the next step of W3C Recommendation and then beyond:

Very good job overall.  RIF is needed and well designed.   It is a major step forward towards the vision of web-interoperable semantic rules that I have personally devoted much of my career to in the last dozen years.  It fulfills much of the technical vision of the RuleML effort that I co-founded.  I greatly appreciate the diligent and careful efforts of the Working Group members and the W3C, as well as the other stakeholders and participants in the standardization process, in getting us to this point.

Next steps beyond moving to Recommendation status, over the next few years, should include extending RIF expressively under the Framework for Logic Dialects -- especially to include
-       defaults/nonmonotonicity
-       more deeply integrated reactiveness, and
-       more higher-order/reflection features.
Vulcan and its R&D partner organizations have been developing proposals for new dialect(s), including RIF SILK, that address these additional needed features.

Disclaimer:  Note the views above are my own and do not necessarily represent those of Vulcan Inc.

Benjamin

Benjamin Grosof, PhD -- Semantic Technologies.
-       Sr. Research Program Manager, Vulcan Inc.
Head of Project Halo Advanced Research (HalAR) program.
-       Co-Founder, RuleML Initiative
-       Invited Expert 2005-2007, W3C RIF Working Group


-----Original Message-----
From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Sandro Hawke
Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2010 3:16 PM
To: semantic-web@w3.org
Subject: RIF is Proposed Recommendation


The W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) is now a W3C Proposed
Recommendation [0].  At this point, after several years of development
with public feedback [1][2][3], W3C member organizations [4] get a final
chance to review it and vote on whether it becomes a W3C Recommendation.
The review period is four weeks.

RIF is the product of a cooperative effort among several communities
interested in "rule languages", but having different use cases, goals,
and technologies.  Participant background included logic programming
(including Prolog), production rules (including Jess and other Rete
systems), as well as XML, RDF, and OWL.  The result includes a Core
(intersection) language, along with a pair of extended languages
suitable for more specialized situations.

You probably want to start with:

    http://www.w3.org/TR/rif-overview

There are several implementations available, at various levels of
maturity [5].  I don't know of any that are both complete and ready
for production use yet, but I expect we'll see several in the next
6-12 months, and maybe sooner.

There is a mailing list for users and implementors (with minimal
traffic so far) at:

    http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rif-dev/

and a FAQ:

    http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/RIF_FAQ

If you have comments or concerns and want them to be seen and
addressed by the Working Group, please send them to
public-rif-comments@w3.org<mailto:public-rif-comments@w3.org>.


   -- Sandro       (W3C staff contact for RIF WG)

[0] http://www.w3.org/News/2010#entry-8795
[1] http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/charter
[3] http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/Public_Comments
[4] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List
[5] http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/Implementations