Re: RIF: soundness and semantics --> functional requirements?

Vincent, Paul D wrote:
> The *requirement* is interchange, and a *solution* to achieve that would be a declarative semantics interchange format. 
>   

I think that most of the RIF-lers have already agreed that interchange 
is one of our goals, so not a requirement. It might be the case that 
(technical) requirements have a 'solution' flavour, however a solution 
for meeting the requirement on semantics would be e.g. to have a 
concrete declarative semantics for sets of deductive rules.

Regards,
Paula

> 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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