Review of RIF in RDF

[Resend from a different account. My earlier send didn't seem to get through. Dave]

Closing action-1049

** Summary: 
- Sections 7/8 need some fixing up
- one (minor) bug in the table
- a number of editorial ('@@') comments need deleting or acting on,
  along with some other minor cleanup suggestions

** Sections 7/8:

The split of the description of rif:usedWithProfile across two sections
doesn't work very well. There is not quite enough in section 7 to
explain how to use the property. 

More seriously the description in section 8 assumes the ability to
extract an encoded rule set from an arbitrary graph and subtract just
those triples involved in the encoding. However, I don't believe such a
triple-removal algorithm is possible (given arbitrary metadata embedding
in rules and the optional translation of such metadata to RDF) and
certainly isn't included in the document. It would require a lot more
than XTr (which itself is an item of future work and not defined in the
doc).

In addition it seems like the intent is to also allow a graph to contain
both a RIF rule set and some RDF data it is to be applied to but you
have to import a different ruleset in order to trigger this behaviour
which is odd.

There are also still some '@@' remarks left in those sections.

Suggested rewrite(s) attached at [2] below. Note, necessarily this has
slightly different semantics to what was in there already.

** Bug:

o Section 5.3, table 1 the entry for the second row is broken. The
'focus_node rdf:type rif:Const' in the left hand column presumably
shouldn't be there and the right hand column should presumably be
'focus_node rif:constIRI <value>' not ' ... "value"'

** Minor:

o Section 2, UC4, phrasing glitch
  s/if the systems, if the extensions/, provided that the extensions/

o Section 3, Req6. The phrase "viewed as triples, there should be no
indication of which features are in which dialects or extensions;" seems
unnecessary and is not met by the design. The namespace of the
property/class will give such an "indication" but is not harmful.
Suggest dropping the quoted phrase or replacing with something like "the
RDF representation of extensions should follow the same structure as the
standard dialects".

o Section 4. Incomplete reference [@@SOAP]

o Section 4. Editorial marker "@@@ Update example"
[The example certainly is confusing, especially for a reader who hasn't
yet read the remainder of the document. Illustrating with syntax
snippets would help. Presumably minimum would be to drop the editorial
marker and leave the example as is - not ideal but not a major problem.]

o Section 5. Suggest dropping the final paragraph referencing OWL 2
mapping. I don't see how reading about a different mapping, for a
different language, defined using a different notation, is supposed to
help :)

o Section 5. Editorial comment "@@ consider merging tables".
Suggest just deleting this comment. The tables are fine as they are.

o Section 6 has more "@@" comments and Editor's note than it has content
and needs cleaning before publication. Suggested text [1].

Other:
o The mention of "incomplete running of transformation rules" (Section 3
Req4 and Section 4) still grates :)  I'd find it less distracting if
those mentions were removed but that doesn't change the substance of the
document so don't formally object to them remaining.

o The discussion on handling of <meta> in sections 5.2 and 5.3 is OK but
could be clearer if illustrated with a concrete example. I realize that
may be more work than there is available time.

Dave

[1] Suggested text for section 6.

[[[
Because the above mapping function Tr is not injective (one-to-one), the
inverse mapping is not a function, but provides many outputs for each
input. Intuitively, Tr loses information, such as the order in which
property elements occurred in the RIF XML document, so properly
reconstructing a RIF XML document requires additional information.

It is possible to define a reverse mapping XTr which is constrained to
produce only schema-valid RIF XML documents.  Given a RIF-XML document D
and a round-trip transformed document D'

    D' = Xtr( Tr(D), XML-schema, XML-root-element )

Then D' will not be identical to D, due to reordering and restructuring.
However, the semantics of D will be preserved in that the rule sets
corresponding to D and D' will have identical entailments under the
relevant RIF Dialect semantics.

Editor's Note: In a future version of this document the details of XTr
will be given, along with clarification of round-tripping guarantees.
]]]


[2] Suggested text for sections 7/8

[[[
7. Importing RIF into RDF

SWC [RIF RDF+OWL] defines the entailments of combinations (R, G) where R
(a RIF rule set) includes an import of G (an RDF graph). 

We hereby define an RDF predicate <code>rif:usedWithProfile</code> which
enables an import to be specified from the graph G instead of from R.

In the simple usage the graph G is a plain RDF graph and
<code>rif:usedWithProfile</code> is used to combine that graph with one
or more externally defined RIF rule sets. In this usage each subject of
a <code>rif:usedWithProfile</code> assertion should be the URI for a RIF
rule set (which may be encoded in RIF-XML or RIF-in-RDF) and the object
should be an import profile as defined in SWC [RIF RDF+OWL]. 

It is also possible for the graph G to itself contain both an encoded
ruleset along with additional RDF statements to which the ruleset is
intended to apply. This usage is supported by using a blank node as the
subject of a <code>rif:usedWithProfile</code> assertion.

8. Semantics of RIF in RDF

A RIF-in-RDF-aware processor shall treat any RDF graph G as a RIF-RDF or
RIF-OWL combination [RIF RDF+OWL] as follows:

Let G' be the graph obtained from G by removing all triples with
predicate rif:usedWithProfile.

Let R be either the empty RIF rule set or, if G contains a
rif:usedWithProfile triple with a blank subject node, then let R be the
rule set obtained by inverting the Tr mapping to extract any rules
encoded within G.

Then G is to be treated by a RIF-in-RDF-aware processor as the ruleset
R' by amending R  with the following  imports directives:

    Imports(R1) 
    ...
    Imports(Rn)
    Imports(G' P1)
    ...
    Imports(G' Pn)

Where Ri and Pi are the subjects/objects respectively of triples of
form:
    Ri rif:usedWithProfile Pi     where Ri is a URI reference

Remark 1: Note that the fact that G' is treated as being imported with
all profiles P1 ... Pn enforces G' to be treated according to the
highest profiles among P1 ... Pn, cf. Section 5.2 of [RIF RDF+OWL].

Remark 2: Note that if G includes an encoded RIF rule set then the
triples that make up that encoding are visible in the (R', G')
combination. 

Remark 3: If the graph G can be obtained from URI Ug then including the
triple   
     [] rif:usedWithProfile P .
is equivalent to including:
    <Ug> rif:usedWithProfile P .
I.e. self including the graph as a rule set has the same effect as
explicitly including the same graph as an external ruleset.

Remark 4: Note the discussion in the section 6 that the inversion of Tr
is not a deterministic function.
]]]

Editor's Note: The support for self-inclusion by using a blank node may
be controversial. If so then drop that in order to get to publication.
In that case the suggested text is:

[[[
7. Importing RIF into RDF

SWC [RIF RDF+OWL] defines the entailments of combinations (R, G) where R
(a RIF rule set) includes an import of G (an RDF graph). 

We hereby define an RDF predicate <code>rif:usedWithProfile</code> which
enables an import to be specified from the graph G instead of from R.

Each subject of a <code>rif:usedWithProfile</code> assertion should be
the URI for an externally defined RIF rule set (which may be encoded in
RIF-XML or RIF-in-RDF) and the object should be an import profile as
defined in SWC [RIF RDF+OWL]. 

8. Semantics of RIF in RDF

A RIF-in-RDF-aware processor shall treat any RDF graph G as a RIF-RDF or
RIF-OWL combination [RIF RDF+OWL] as follows:

Let G' be the graph obtained from G by removing all triples with
predicate rif:usedWithProfile.

Then G is to be treated by a RIF-in-RDF-aware processor as the ruleset
R:
   Document (
    Imports(R1) 
    ...
    Imports(Rn)
    Imports(G' P1)
    ...
    Imports(G' Pn)
   )

Where Ri and Pi are the subjects/objects respectively of triples of
form:
    Ri rif:usedWithProfile Pi 

Remark 1: Note that the fact that G' is treated as being imported with
all profiles P1 ... Pn enforces G' to be treated according to the
highest profiles among P1 ... Pn, cf. Section 5.2 of [RIF RDF+OWL].

Remark 2: Note that if G itself includes a RIF ruleset encoded as
RIF-in-RDF then no special additional processing is performed, those
encoded rules are not included in R. If the Graph G is available from
some URI Ug then it is possible for G to reference itself as a rule set
by including the triple:
    <Ug> rif:usedWithProfile P .

Remark 3: Note the discussion in the section 6 that the inversion of Tr
is not a deterministic function.
]]]

Received on Monday, 13 September 2010 19:17:17 UTC