Review of Abstract Use Case: Interchange of Human-oriented Business Rules

This message contains my review of the abstract use case Interchange of 
Human-oriented Business Rules. (This was an Action Item in the January 31 
telecon, continued on the February 7 phone call.) One of my comments in 
the review below is that a narrative is still missing. I would be happy to 
volunteer to create such a narrative, if the authors of this use case 
would like.

Review of Use Case for Interchange of Human-oriented Business Rules

General remarks: 

This use case does a good job of explaining what is inside and outside of 
its scope and explaining what specifically distinguishes this use case 
category from others. It has a good analysis of the benefits of 
interchange, requirements on the RIF, and actors and their goals. Its main 
deficiency is its lack of a sample narrative and main and alternate 
sequences.

Specific Remarks:

Section 1, Abstract: Excellent section, much more detailed than other 
general use case descriptions. Especially good are 
--- the discussion of what is included in and out of the scope
--- the discussion of what distinguishes ?organization to organization? 
rule interchanges and ?organization to IT system? rule interchanges
--- the discussion of the EU car rental example. This example, suitably 
expanded, could serve as the start of a sample narrative for section 9.

Section 3, Links to Related Use Cases: Good section. In contrast to many 
of the abstract use case descriptions that merely link the specific use 
cases under their category, without explanation, this list contains use 
cases in other categories as well, and also furnishes a short explanation 
of why the use case is related.

However, the relationship between this abstract use case and the cases 
listed seems to be more hoped-for than actual. For example, it?s clear 
that for the use case ?Product Compatibility,? various human-oriented 
business rules would be interchanged among various parties. But the 
details of such rules haven?t been made clear (even though this is a 
relatively detailed use case, as they go), and the precise connection 
isn?t yet clear. Presumably, this issue will be resolved during future 
iterations of the use cases.

Section 4, Relationship to OWL/RDF Compatibility: 

It?s not entirely clear what it meant by the sentence in this section: 
?The class of rule systems that this use case refers to is based on the 
integration of linguistics and predicate logic.?

What does it mean to integrate linguistics and predicate logic? The 
relationship between language, linguistics, and predicate logic is a long 
and complex one. There are many difficult problems that have arisen; these 
problems are not likely to be solved anytime soon; and presumably, one can 
progress quite nicely without solving these problems.

Some clarification of this paragraph would be useful.

Section 6, Benefits of Interchange: Good, detailed section.

Section 7, Requirements on the RIF:

 Nice section.  Some of these requirements, though, may be hard to 
deliver. Is there really an expectation that the RIF will be able to 
handle alethic and deontic operators? (I would be delighted if this were 
so, but my understanding was that the tendency was to move the RIF toward 
simplicity.) If not, will the RIF not be able to handle interchange of 
human-oriented business rules at all, or will there be someway, 
nevertheless, of handling these cases?

Similarly, the requirement that the rules be ?mappable in both directions, 
without semantic loss, to a subset of natural language that are sufficient 
to express in natural language all kinds of terms and relations ? to 
specify all kinds of RIF rules? seems to be overly ambitious. This  --- 
the mapping between formal rules and subsets of natural language --- is an 
enormously difficult problem, and  is not likely to be solved anytime 
soon.

Section 8.1, Actors and their Goals: Good, detailed section. This section, 
together with the example rules given in section 1, can serve as the core 
of a more worked-out example and narrative for section 9, which is 
currently missing.