RIF: soundness and semantics --> functional requirements?

The *requirement* is interchange, and a *solution* to achieve that would be a declarative semantics interchange format. 

In my systems engineering days, we used the term "functional requirements" in order to specify the design constraints deduced from the requirements to guide the implementation. Generally these are the consensus / obvious deductions from the (business or high level) requirements - such as if a data store is required then the functional requirement is to use a database. Perhaps we need candidate functional requirements listed like this, separate from the critical success factors + requirements?

Paul Vincent
for Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor  -- Business Rule Management System
@ OMG and W3C standards for rules
> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-rif-wg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-rif-wg-request@w3.org]
> On Behalf Of Francois Bry
> Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2006 8:21 AM
> To: public-rif-wg@w3.org
> Subject: Re: soundness and semantics
> 
> 
> 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

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Received on Thursday, 18 May 2006 07:38:06 UTC