RE: [RIF] Extensible Design

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