Re: An appeal

> We want to encourage a  rich ecology of rule languages and systems 
> which are interoperable.
> 
> In any event here is what I propose:
> 
> That we start off by devising a simple metadata scheme that can be 
> used to tag rule sets and rule engines. The metadata would include 
> for the rule sets information about the nature of the rules and 
> information relevant to industry users who may wish to exchange rule 
> sets. For the engine, the metadata would include reference to a 
> simple relatively high-level template based description of the manner 
> in which rules are interpreted.
> 
> In short we start off by making rule sets and rule engines 'self 
> descriptive' and worry about the hard stuff later - if at all.

So you're advocating language tagging, as described in the workshop
report, section 3.5 [1].  (You're describing it rather better than I
did in that section of the report, but it seems to me like the same
idea.)   

I think that's a very rational approach, but I don't see how it can
really meet many of the needs I heard at the workshop, like to provide
effective cross-vendor portability, does it?

> Do I see a big problem with "establishing a standard language of "if
> condition then condition/error/action" and defining conformant 
> implementations in terms of the above functions? Basically ... yes. I 
> think we could characterise different rules and perhaps agree on 
> syntactic matters but actually there are very many different ways in 
> which these languages could be interpreted with subtle but 
> practically important semantic differences.

That's why it takes it takes a long time and a lot of work to develop
an effective specification, yes....  Or am I missing something?

      -- sandro

Received on Wednesday, 6 July 2005 19:45:31 UTC