Re: New RIF drafts

On 15 Apr 2008, at 18:07, Sandro Hawke wrote:
>
>
> We have some new drafts from the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working
> Group.  While the group is not targeted at producing a "Semantic Web
> Rule Language", its output will cover much of the same space.  I  
> suggest
> anyone interested in rule languages (especially from a web  
> perspective)
> take a look at what RIF is doing and send comments:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/rif-bld/   (our first RIF dialect, Horn with  
> Equality)
> http://www.w3.org/TR/rif-fld/   (framework for more logic dialects)
> http://www.w3.org/TR/rif-rdf-owl/  (how to use BLD with RDF, OWL-DL,  
> OWL-Full)

I'm more-or-less ignorant of the technical issues here, but at a  
surface level the presentation syntax given in example 2 of the FLD  
appears to have some arbitrary differences from SPARQL, eg the use of
    abbr expands into uri
instead of
    PREFIX abbr: <uri>
and the use of ()s for grouping, as opposed to {}s, and some of the  
operators being prefix and some being infix.

There may well be cultural reasons for this syntax, but I expect many  
people to want to work with both syntaxes, and some commonality might  
be helpful in reducing the learning curve.

- Steve