Re: [RIF] What is in the scope of RIF and what is not?

Christian de Sainte Marie wrote:
>
> Dear RIFers,
>
> The RIF+QL and the RDF/OWL compatibility discussions touched a number 
> of points that I would like to be sure I understand and everybody 
> understands and agrees on.
>
> One of them regards the very nature of the RIF, that is, rule 
> _interchange_.
>
> I have read in several postings things like "the problem is if the 
> head/conclusion of a rule contains this or that, because it would make 
> the rule unsafe" (e.g. in one of Enrico's mail "the problem happens if 
> the query contains an existential variable (e.g. a bnode), since this 
> would make the rule unsafe"): I do not understand why this is a 
> problem from the view point of the RIF.
>
> Let me explain: as I understand the use of the RIF, there is a rule 
> language L1 and a rule language L2; somebody writes rules in L1 for a 
> specific purpose and somebody wants to be able to translate those 
> rules into L2 for some specific purpose. In this basic RIF scenario, 
> rules are designed/written in L1, mapped into the RIF, mapped from RIF 
> into L2, and used (e.g. executed by a rule engine, but not 
> necessarily) in L2. And, in this basic scenario, a rule being safe or 
> unsafe is the problem of L1 and L2 and their users and how they use 
> the rules, not the RIF.
>
> More generally, my understanding is that the RIF has to be able to 
> carry unambiguously what a rule means, but what an application does, 
> or what it may or may not do with the rule, or the consequences of 
> using that rule, is out of the scope of the RIF.
>
> Of course, my understanding may be quite naive here: it would help me 
> (and maybe others), if we could provide examples fitting the basic 
> scenario above (L1 -> RIF -> L2 -> application) when we discuss such 
> problems, difficulties and issues.
>
> Actually, it would help making sure that a discussion is in scope if 
> any point made on the mailing list what illustrated with an example in 
> the above form, thus showing where, how and to what degree it is 
> expected to impact the design of the RIF, as opposed to impacting the 
> receiving/using application.
Hi Christian,

I think you touched on some very good points here...the fact that 
discussions accompanied by concrete examples would be more helpful is 
one of the issues that shouldn't be underestimated throughout the whole 
work in the RIF WG. I would even say that, at this point, it would be 
good to link the issues under discussion to some of the submitted use 
cases (IOW, as Sandro said yesterday during the telecon, to have the 
discussions in the context of use cases). This could help also to easily 
extract the requirements on the RIF, which is exactly what we need to do 
next.

Regards from Munich,
Paula