Re: [BLD] equality use cases + implementation announcement

Dear Alexandre,

Thanks for your continued support of RIF, and for the use cases in support of 
equality.

May we list your implementation on the RIF implementations page:

http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/Implementations


Alexandre Riazanov wrote:
 > Hi everybody,
 >
 > I am working on prototype for semantic querying of relational databases
 > (http://www.freewebs.com/riazanov/query_answering.pdf),
 > and RIF BLD is envisaged as one of the input languages (TPTP, OWL 2, SWRL
 > and Derivational RuleML are the others).
 > Since (a branch of) the Vampire prover is currently the core of the system,
 > it will essentially become a rule engine for BLD, supporting query
 > answering.
 >
 > The first implementation will simply convert BLD to TPTP, so it will be
 > useable with all TPTP reasoners.
 > Since it's basically just a Java API, the toolkit may be useful for purposes
 > other than TPTP conversion:
 > it will have a factory for the abstract syntax + JAXB-based parser/renderer.
 >
 > All the software will be open source. I am expecting to publish an alpha in
 > September.
 >
 > Since the positive equality in BLD is still in danger, I would like to
 > mention a couple of
 > examples I came across recently, working on the RDB stuff.
 >
 > Use case 1. Semantic querying requires semantic mapping of RDB schemas,
 > e.g.,
 > by linking the tables to application domain concepts and relations.
 > Typically,
 > a part of a schema is just a declaration of functional dependencies between
 > attributes
 > of tables. These can be easily expressed if our language allows equality,
 > e.g.
 > the following rule states that the table_person.name functionally depends on
 > table_person.sin :
 >
 > ?NAME1 = ?NAME2
 >    :-
 > And
 >   (
 >       table_person(sin -> ?SIN, name -> ?NAME1),
 >       table_person(sin -> ?SIN, name -> ?NAME2)
 >    )
 >
 >
 > Such rules can be used by the reasoner for search space reduction, e.g, by
 > contextual rewriting.
 >
 >
 > Use case 2. Suppose we use several RDBs designed by different people for
 > different purposes.
 > The same entities can be represented differently in different DBs. For
 > example, the same
 > person can be identified with his SIN in one DB, and with a surrogate
 > integer key in another DB:
 >
 > person_for_sin(?SIN) # Person
 >     :-
 > db1.table_person(sin -> ?SIN, name -> ?NAME)
 >
 >
 >
 > person_for_key(?KEY) # Person
 >     :-
 > db2.table_person(key -> ?KEY, sin -> ?SIN, name -> ?NAME)
 >
 >
 > hasSIN(person_for_key(?KEY),?SIN)
 >     :-
 > db2.table_person(key -> ?KEY, sin -> ?SIN, name -> ?NAME)
 >
 >
 >
 >
 > So, for cross-querying we absolutely need something like this:
 >
 > person_for_sin(?SIN) = ?P
 >    :-
 > And(
 >         ?P # Person,
 >         hasSIN(?P,?SIN)
 >       )
 >
 >
 > Please note that these are just recent examples that are fresh in my mind.
 > I have seen others.

Received on Friday, 28 August 2009 13:33:13 UTC