- From: Francois Bry <bry@ifi.lmu.de>
- Date: Fri, 05 May 2006 11:33:49 +0200
- To: W3C RIF WG <public-rif-wg@w3.org>
Vincent, Paul D wrote: > Francois - I interpret this as: > - the rules being interchanged have semantics > - the actual interchange mechanism itself does not. > > This is presumably a problem for those who identify RIF itself as a future semantic web rule language, rather than an interchange mechanism for whatever that language turns out to be. > > Or am I missing something here? > > These are clear statements -- but they do not fully convince me. For expressing the semantics of the rules being exchanged, we need a formalism. I can only think of thwo such formalism: A. Specifying the rule engine, eg Prolog 3, or one of the semantics known from the literature, e.g. stratified semantics with structural equality. B. Rely on a more refined formalism for specifying the semantics. A is fully system, product, language, etc. dependent. Furthermore, how to convert a ruleset after, say Prolog 3, in a rule set after a PR language, is in almost all practical cases fully unknown. Therefore, my conclusion is that A looks nice -- but leads to nothinhg usefull. B, in my opinion, means that the interchange language comes along with a formalism for expressing semantics. This amount to be a language with a well-defined semantics (possibly allowing variations). Thus, my understanding is that a usefull interchange mechanism requires a rule language with semantics. Francois
Received on Friday, 5 May 2006 09:34:00 UTC