- From: Stan Devitt <stan.devitt@gwi-ag.com>
- Date: Fri, 5 May 2006 10:01:39 +0200
- To: 'Hassan Aït-Kaci' <hak@ilog.com>, "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@inf.unibz.it>
- Cc: public-rif-wg@w3.org
The "notation" and "representational" points that are mentioned here by Hassan are extremely important. RIF does not, itsself, need to evaluate, execute or carry out the actions/operations/activities/data that are represented. It does need a extensible syntax rich enough to represent all of the underlying objects and with enough metadata (either explict, or implicit by design) to clarify which dialect, etc. is involved at both the expression and message level. Stan Devitt -----Original Message----- From: public-rif-wg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-rif-wg-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Hassan Aït-Kaci Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 6:49 PM To: Peter F. Patel-Schneider Cc: public-rif-wg@w3.org Subject: Re: [RIF] Extensible Design ... In fact, since the beginning, the questions of "Is the RIF a language?" and if so, "What is its syntax and its semantics?", have not been clearly settled. In my understanding, the RIF is not a language but a notational protocol using accepted W3C standards (XML, RDF, OWL, ...) for representing families of rule-based languages (as more or less circumscribed by the RIF Charter). Its objective is to enable interchange of programs expressed in various existing rule-based idioms to be shared or borrowed among various rule-based systems. Program constructs expressed in various idioms that are compliant with the RIF should be mappable to concepts and features of the ontology of the RIF conceptual lattice (rule language classification). Regarding semantics? Again, the RIF IS NOT A LANGUAGE, but a notation for (families of rule) languages. The rule languages that are representable using this notation have themselves a semantics, of course (presumably based on the syntax they understand - see Frank MacCabe's message http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rif-wg/2006May/0063.html. So what is the semantics of a RIF notation? It is in fact a representational semantics: the XML elements expressing RIF constructs denote abstract representation of meta-linguistic objects that are interpretable by client systems (compilers or interpretors) based on the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatgic features that the RIF annotation provides. ... -hak -- Hassan Aït-Kaci ILOG, Inc. - Product Division R&D tel/fax: +1 (604) 930-5603 - email: hak @ ilog . com
Received on Friday, 5 May 2006 08:01:56 UTC