- From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2006 13:19:00 -0500
- To: kifer@cs.sunysb.edu (Michael Kifer)
- Cc: Francis McCabe <frankmccabe@mac.com>, Paul Vincent <pvincent@tibco.com>, Gary Hallmark <gary.hallmark@oracle.com>, W3C RIF WG <public-rif-wg@w3.org>
> > Well, if the purpose of the RIF is to have a language that represents
> > the intersection of all rule languages, as opposed to being a means
> > of interchange between rule systems, then you would be right. But I
> > am strongly of the view that the intersection of all rule languages
> > is empty.
> >
> > On the other hand, a different form of conformance would be that any
> > given rule language should be able to express their rules in the RIF.
> > That does not require all rule language engines to be able to
> > understand all elements of the core.
>
> Right. Our responses to Sandro have crossed in the mail. In that msg, I
> proposed that RIF conformance should mean that a semantic-preserving
> mapping to a RIF dialect (or dialects). Moreover, some systems might want
> to provide mappings from only some subsets of their systems for various
> reasons.
The W3C position [1] is that good conformance clauses are essential,
because they promote interoperability. They allow the market forces to
drive adoption. If we allow any and all systems to say truthfully that
they implement RIF, regardless of what functionality they actually
provide, then there will be no way for customers to actually demand the
products that give them the kind of interoperability they want.
Customers want to know that something that "implements RIF Core"
implements ALL of RIF Core, not that it implements some unknown
arbitrary subset and may well do nothing for them.
-- Sandro
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/qaframe-spec/#conformance-clause
Received on Sunday, 17 December 2006 18:20:08 UTC