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.

Thanks, Steve.  I'm inclinded to agree with you (not surprisingly).  I
will be interested to see how the WG discussion on this goes.  Would you
mind sending this comment to the comments lists [1] to help motivate and
guide that discussion?  If you have the time to flesh it out a little --
maybe to a specific list of changes which would provide good alignment?
-- we'd appreciate it.   (Other folks are welcome to do the same, of
course.) 

      -- Sandro

[1] public-rif-comments@w3.org