RIF vs Rule Language

On the topic of the difference between a Rule Interchange Format (RIF) 
and a Rule Language (RL), I consulted:

Variability in Specifications
http://www.w3.org/TR/spec-variability/

It seems that clarity about what 'class of product' we are talking about 
helps:
   - in terms of a producer or a consumer of a rule interchange format 
and/or a rule language behaviour is identical. A producer produces 
syntactically legal rules, a consumer accepts them.
  - in terms of a rule processor, we may distinguish between a RIF and a 
RL in that a rule processor would have to act on a RL in a completely 
specified way, whereas with a RIF, different rule processors may do 
different things.

It may be possible to permit that variability while somehow having a 
fixed semantics for the rules being interchanged (I'm not sure how though).

At this stage my expectation would be that in phase 1, there is no 
difference: the core language being interchanged has a well-defined 
semantics and rule processors have little or no flexibility in its 
interpretation.

In phase 2, however, we are expecting variability in the behaviour of 
rule processors: and this variability is what makes it an interchange 
format rather than a rule language. There are open questions about how 
we achieve that through extensibility while maintaining some sense of 
interoperability: one way might be that different extensions enable 
different semantics.

Jeremy

Received on Thursday, 8 December 2005 20:22:50 UTC