RE: Comment on RIF-PRD

Dear Chris,

Thank you for this explanation.  I'm glad to hear that RIF does provide a way to attach procedures implemented in other programming languages.

Yours,

Tom Gordon

Dr. Thomas F. Gordon
Fraunhofer FOKUS
Berln, Germany
email: thomas.gordon@fokus.fraunhofer.de



-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Welty [mailto:cawelty@gmail.com]
Sent: Fri 8/28/2009 3:35 PM
To: Gordon, Thomas
Cc: public-rif-comments@w3.org
Subject: Re: Comment on RIF-PRD
 
Tom,

Thanks for the feedback. Regarding your final comment, the existing RIF 
specification for externals *is* a general and extensible method for attaching 
procedures, which could be builtins or be defined using existing programming 
languages. See FLD Section 2.4 item number 8:

[External] terms are used for representing built-in functions and predicates as 
well as
"procedurally attached" terms or predicates, which might exist in various 
rule-based systems,
but are not specified by RIF.

DTB is a list of externals that are *required* for interoperability, but does 
not preclude defining others.

Please acknowledge receipt of this email to <mailto:public-rif-comments@w3.org> 
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know whether or not you are satisfied with the working group's response to your 
comment.

-The RIF WG

Tom Gordon wrote:
 > The time is ripe for a W3C standard for rules and RIF looks to me to be
 > a very good proposal, building on the experience of previous work on
 > SWRL and RuleML, among other initiatives.   I particularly like its
 > modular structure and its extensibility using FLD.  It remains to be
 > seen whether FLD will be expressive enough for requirements in the legal
 > domain, for defining a dialect capable of modeling legislation in an
 > "isomorphic" way, which is important for both validating and maintaining
 > the models.  In a three year European project, ESTRELLA, which ended in
 > 2008, we developed a rule interchange language for models of
 > legislation, called the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF)
 > expressly for this purpose. We may have built LKIF on top of RIF had it
 > been available at the time.  It may be an interesting task to see if
 > LKIF could be reconstructed as a RIF dialect using FLD.
 >
 > One nitpick:  RIF, like SWRL before it,  define a bunch of "builtin"
 > predicate and function symbols.   I would have much preferred a more
 > general and extensible method for attaching procedures, defined using
 > existing programming langauges.