Re: [RIF] [UCR]: What is the RIF (revisited)

+1

At 01:42 PM 2/9/2006 +0000, Dave Reynolds wrote:

>Dieter Fensel wrote:
>
>>This completely neglects the idea of defining (as a side effect) a useful 
>>rule language for the web.
>
>That is an interesting way of putting it and I think it goes to the heart 
>of this "is RIF also a language" discussion.
>
>[What follows is not as clear as I'd like to be. To claw back some brevity 
>I'll state as facts some things which are, at best, over simplifications.]
>
>If we look at the business rules market then we have a number of mature 
>and successful products. One goal for RIF in that market is to enable 
>users to move rules between systems, in which case RIF is for interchange 
>between well-established systems. No vendor will change their language to 
>move towards some invented RIF language. That's as it should be.
>
>In the semantic web area we have quite a large number of proposals and 
>implemented systems with a very wide diversity but not the same maturity. 
>This diversity inhibits rule developers because they may get locked into a 
>particular rule implementation and can't easily share their rules with 
>other web developers who want to reuse them for similar tasks. RIF could 
>bring some coherence to this space. If there were to be a RIF profile 
>which defined a reasonably simple, understandable, RDF/OWL compatible rule 
>format and semantics that covered "80%" of "interesting" cases then:
>(a) that might give a profile that rule authors could write to in order to 
>gain some implementation independence and ability to share rules;
>(b) at least some semantic web rule language implementers might migrate 
>their systems to be more compatible with that profile, possibly even as 
>far as doing a direct implementation.
>
>A nice feature of the way the RIF work is structured is that having such a 
>profile would in no way preclude other extensions needed to handle 
>exchange between systems with more advanced capabilities.
>
>Thus whilst the goal of RIF is interchange of rules, it *may* also have 
>the side effect of providing the seed for a semantic web rule language. I 
>don't think that side effect is in conflict with the main goal.

DERI is fully committed to provide an open source reference implementation 
for RIF as soon as it is defined.
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Dieter Fensel, http://www.deri.org/
Tel.: +43-512-5076485/8
Skype: dieterfensel

Received on Thursday, 9 February 2006 14:04:16 UTC