- From: Jeremy Carroll <jjc@hpl.hp.com>
- Date: Thu, 08 Dec 2005 20:21:16 +0000
- To: public-rif-wg@w3.org
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