Re: RIF+SPARQL (was Re: Entailment regimes open issues)

On 2/8/10 8:41 AM, "Sandro Hawke" <sandro@w3.org> wrote:
>> One more problem for the RIF part is that I've always said that we
>> need an editor for RIF and that won't be me. I have not even read the
>> RIF spec (skimmed over parts that touch OWL) and I don't have the time
>> to first understand RIF and which parts of RIF are suitable to
>> integrate with SPARQL and how that can be done properly. We would
>> really need somebody with RIF background to put in the time to write
>> this.

> Yeah, unfortunately, we don't have much intersection here between people
> who know/care about RIF and SPARQL.

I've expressed interest in the past in helping here and I do know/care about
the intersection (personally in the research I do and in how we use SPARQL
at the workplace). 
 
> Can someone here make the case for why RIF folks should care about this?
> I tried to get interest from the RIF-WG, but I don't think I explained
> it very well.

I believe the case is straight forward, but maybe I'm mistaken.  Any
entailment mechanism for RDF is really only as useful (to the developer
anyways) as it is easy to incorporate into existing tools.  It seems a bit
of a waste to have a way to specify your semantics on the one hand and to
not have a standard way to incorporate them into the standard querying
interface for RDF (SPARQL).  This was one of the major motivations behind
SPARQL-DL.  I would think RIF folks would be interested in further
integrating RIF into the SW specifications so it can be used with ease and
in a practical way (rather than relying on two separate subsystems: SPARQL
over fully-entailed graphs and a RIF processor).  Otherwise, you run the
risk of having a nice way to specify rule-based semantics that is an island
onto itself in the SW technology stack.
 
> The general idea, I gather, is to be able to do SPARQL queries against a
> RIF-powered deductive triple store.  But I don't understand what needs
> to be spec'd for that; it seems to me like the parts fit together in
> exactly one obvious way.

I still think if we settle on a lowest common denominator (a safe RIF
profile such as RIF Core - whose entailment relationship should coincide
with that of OWL2) to start with, the current framework in the entailment
specification can be re-used for the most part in a straightforward way.

-- Chime


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Received on Monday, 8 February 2010 14:22:32 UTC