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

On Feb 10, 2006, at 3:34 AM, Igor Mozetic wrote:

> Dieter Fensel wrote:
>> At 14:21 09.02.2006 +0100, Piero A. Bonatti wrote:
>>> +1 !!!!!!!!!!
>>>
>>> On Thursday 09 February 2006 08:55, Francois Bry wrote:
[snip]
>>> > c. RDF bnodes are a serious challenge for efficient reasoning 
>>> which, to
>>> > the best of my knowledge, is far from being solved.
>>> >
>> Indeed, this is something very stupid about RDF. Why is this a 
>> recommendation
>> to repeat similar mistakes for RIF?
>
> Shouldn't be OWL added to the list as well?

Which species of OWL?

> In general, it seems that IETF process of accepting Internet 
> standards/RFCs (the requirement for prior implementation and testing)
> works well.

The W3C has a similar requirement. The CR (candidate recommendation) 
phase is where you are required to gather implementation experience of 
the complete design. Hence, while designing, you look for current 
implementation experience in anticipation of the CR. This was, in fact, 
done for OWL, esp. the DL fragment. My organization (the MIND Lab) 
started our OWL DL ++ reasoner Pellet specifically to show that 
traditional tableau reasoners were not *that* difficult to implement 
(i.e., there had been some concern in the WebOnt group that only people 
deep in the DL community could do it; not so).

> Maybe at least for RIF we should try to stay closer to
> operational recommendations.

Of course, we don't know what the implementation requirements will be, 
exactly. But we ought to be keeping them in mind.

(For example, I could see a phase one approach that did a superset 
rather than a subset approach, wherein while the superset was 
semantically fairly straightforward to specify, the relations between 
the superset and various subsets similarly easy, there was no practical 
or even known complete proof procedure and little hope of one. Does 
that mean it is unimplementable? Well maybe. It still could be the case 
that *analysis* tools short of full inference (e.g., for checking 
compatibility of fragments; even incomplete ones could be very useful) 
would be implementable and I could see a CR criteria set that argued 
that that was what was needed. Indeed, this might be exactly the way in 
which RIF isn't itself a "rule language" but an interchange format. 
Like a "rule language" it has a formal syntax and semantics, but unlike 
a rule language there's no necessity for there to be any practical 
entailment determining procedure. (Just thinking aloud))

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Saturday, 11 February 2006 18:28:37 UTC