Re: RIF vs Rule Language

At 23:49 +0100 12/8/05, Enrico Franconi wrote:

[snip]
>
>The behaviour of a reasoner has to be constrained by the semantics 
>of the language it processes, otherwise its behoaviour will be just 
>arbitrary: that's why we have semantics :-)


well, that's true - but let's not forget there are a number of 
different kinds of semantics - I don't know of any programming 
language in major use that has anything other than operational 
semantics, and they seem to work pretty good (at least this email 
seems to be getting to you through a whole bunch of computers and 
routers and programs, and I suspect few if any have a model theory) --
   this is not to advocate not doing a formal semantics, but just to 
remind people that an option is to do basically an operational 
semantics for the RIF in phase 1, and then nail down the details in 
phase 2 (While people are starting to implement the relatively stable 
stuff) -- this might be a way to get a lot more out the door sooner 
-- I wish I had considered that option when I was chairing the WebOnt 
group - I suspect we'd of gotten to CR sooner if we'd been able to 
move things this way (i.e. if we'd had the reference manual in LC or 
close thereto while we were finalizing the details of the semantics)
  -JH

-- 
Professor James Hendler			  Director
Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery	  	  301-405-2696
UMIACS, Univ of Maryland			  301-314-9734 (Fax)
College Park, MD 20742	 		  http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler
(New course: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler/CMSC498w/)

Received on Friday, 9 December 2005 02:13:15 UTC