local arity, term WFF-ness conflicts with merging requirement?

I noted these two bits of the RIF syntax:

"Each predicate and function symbol has precisely one arity"

"A well-formed term is one that occurs in a well-formed set of fomulas."

  -- http://www.w3.org/TR/rif-bld/

Those seem to be not web-wide definitions, but definitions
that just apply to one file or something. Otherwise,
to take an arbitrary example, the function symbol ABC:
what is its arity?

The context-sensitivity of those definitions seems
to conflict with the requirement to be able to
merge rule sets:

"4.2.12 Merge Rule Sets 
RIF should support the ability to merge rule sets. "
http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/UCR#Merge_Rule_Sets

If ABC has arity 2 in one rule set and arity 3 in
another, what happens when those rule sets are merged?

Is it worthwhile making the requirement more precise as follows?

  any collection of well-formed RIF formulas is itself well-formed

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Monday, 5 May 2008 19:35:41 UTC