- From: Francois Bry <bry@ifi.lmu.de>
- Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 09:21:05 +0200
- To: public-rif-wg@w3.org
ewallace@cme.nist.gov wrote: Thanks, Evans for nicely and accurately rephrasing my thougths. >> 3. In most cases, the specification of a semantics for interchange >> purposes is only possible or meanningfull if this specification is >> simple enough (ie expressible in a few words, not in ten thousand of >> lines of code) and abstract enough ("abstract" being understood here as >> "factoring out some aspects"). >> As a consequence, simple and abstract specifications of semantics for >> RIF rules and rule sets should be a requirement. >> > > This last bit describes a qualitative aspect of a RIF feature, rather than > a feature itself. I am not sure how one can compare abstractness, much > less understand what "simple enough" or "abstract enough" is. Thus while > this seems a good goal, I don't see it as a requirement. > An interchange format to be used between rule languages L1 and L2 must have a declarative semantics in which the declarative and the operational semantics of both L1 and L2 can be mapped (or expressed) into. This, in my opinion, is should be taken as a requirement. This is what was meant be the poinrt 3 mewntioned above. An example might explain it better: the Stable semantics of non-monotonic negation make it possible to express what can be derived/computed from a XSB-Prolog rule set without built-ins. In contrast, the semantics of standard Prolog does not make it possible to declaratively express what can be derived/computed from a XSB-Prolog rule set without built-ins (one can program it in Prolog, but this is not what a RIF streives for.) François
Received on Thursday, 18 May 2006 07:21:16 UTC