Re: Analyzing Use Cases and Requirements (or What is the RIF?)

Ginsberg, Allen wrote:

> The main issue that needs to be addressed is whether the WG endorses
> the view of the RIF specification as incorporating metalinguistic
> features and interchange-enabling features in addition to rule-language
> features.  

Those seems reasonable to me. There is direct support in the charter for 
the first one, specifically in 2.2.5 it says:

[[[
The language must include a way to express facts as well as rules, and also 
metadata (annotations) about documents, facts, and rules. The WG should 
consider the benefits of expressing this metadata in RDF, including the 
ability to query it with SPARQL and analyze it with rules A notion of 
"ruleset" may also be supported.
]]]

which makes it reasonably clear that metalinguistic annotations of rules 
and rulesets are in-scope.

Your third category is slightly less clear cut. In abstract it seems 
correct that features to enable interchange must be in scope. However, a 
specific example such as your "dynamic binding of scope" seem to be part of 
the execution environment and might not be part of RIF itself. Just as 
SPARQL defines how to query named graphs without defining how the binding 
of triples to names is done, RIF might reference the notion of a data scope 
without itself providing mechanisms for defining how that scope is bound.
Perhaps all I'm trying to say is that the category is useful but we want to 
be careful which of the specific requirements we rule as in-scope.

Dave

Received on Thursday, 5 January 2006 17:34:15 UTC