Some comments on RIF-PRD

I am very happy to know that the RIF working group has proposed and
developed the specifications of RIF-Core, RIF-BLD and RIF-PRD for the
semantic web and rule technology communities. I completely endorse these RIF
specifications without any doubt.

We have been doing the research of semantics-enabled policy  for privacy
protection and digital rights management for the past several years (see
http://www.cs.nccu.edu.tw/~jong/pub/pub.html ) . The research is based on
the core technologies of ontology and rule combinations, such as SWRL, RIF
RDF and OWL Compatibility ( http://www.w3.org/TR/rif-rdf-owl/ ) etc. So far
we are eager to see the future possible development of this issue from W3C
viewpoints. For example, one of the hottest issues discussed recently in
the public-lod@w3.org is about the design of event core ontology  (
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2009Aug/0011.html ). In fact,
there have been several well-known RDFS+OWL foundational ontologies proposed
for the event models with action, space, temporal (or time), and
participating agents, such as CIDOC CRM, ABC ontology, Event ontology,
DOLCE+DnS Ultralite, etc.  (see LODE: Linking Open Descriptions of Events
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ischool/2009-036/ ). However, how these event
models are related to the RIF-PRD is still unknown.  Without question, these
event models  provide a rich knowledge representation and framework for the
RIF/FLD and RIF-PRD (http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/PRD ). Furthermore,
they can enable  ECA or production rules interchangable in the distributed
environment, such as the Web.  Even though  we are still in an early stage
to talk about the issue of combination (or integration) of above event
ontologies and RIF-FLD/RIF-PRD rules but I am sure this will be an important
and interesting research problem for the people in two sides  to elaborate.

Yuh-Jong Hu
Professor
Dept. of Computer Science,
National Chengchi University,
Taipei, Taiwan.