[RIF] Critical Success Factors for Goal 1

Dear RIFers,

This is a somewhat revised version of the CSFs for RIF Goal 1 (Exchange
of Rules) that I sent to Frank, Paula, and the team chairs.


Allen



GOAL-1: Promote Exchange of Rules


Critical Success Factors:

CSF-1. An Extensible Standard for Representing Rule Language Families.

One way of promoting the exchange of rules is to develop a standard
rule language and 
1) try to get everyone to use it, and 2) provide reliable tools for
porting existing rules 
into the standard (and vice versa).

For a large number of reasons, that is not feasible, and probably not
desirable.

A single (extensible) standard for representing Rule Languages Families
is, however,
feasible and will also facilitate the exchange of rules.

By a "Rule Language Family" we mean a set of existing rule-languages
that share
an "overall common structure". A precise specification of what the
latter means 
may be one of the outcomes of the work of this group, but, for now, we
do not need 
to develop such a definition. For now, it is enough to acknowledge that
such families
exist. Various dialects of Prolog belong to such a family. It is also
clear that many
production-rule systems belong to the same family.

	Requirement: 
		The RIF standard presupposes that given sets of
rule-language families are provided.
		Initially, these sets may be specified purely
extensionally (i.e., by enumerating the
		specific rule-langugage members).  Also, it is possible
that intially (in phase 1 of
		the RIF activity) that only one such set is provided.

	Requirement:
		For each rule-language family (that the RIF supports)
the RIF must provide a 
            vendor/platform-independent canonical format for
representing rules in that family. 


To say that the RIF is an "extensible standard" means that as new
members of existing rule language
families, or entirely new rule languages families come into being (or
are considered for inclusion 
in the RIF) it must be possible to revise or grow the core RIF
specification to allow rules in the new
language to have a canonical representation in the RIF.  So this leads
to the following requirement:

      Requirement:
 
	    The RIF core must be structured in such a way that rules
belonging to a new rule-language
          or an entirely new family of rule language can, if desired,
be represented with a  
          vendor/platform-independent canonical format without thereby
making the canonical format
          for established RIF Rule Language Families invalid.

CSF-2. Intra-Rule-Language-Family Rule-Exchange Support

Exchanging rule-sets within the same rule-language family may or may
not be trivial, depending
on the family. Whatever the case, it is critical to the success of the
RIF that exchange of rule-sets
belonging to rule-languages in the same family should not only be
possible, but that the use of 
RIF-based technology should make this process reliable and
straightforward.

3. (**Not a CSF **) Inter-Rule-Language-Family Rule-Exchange Support 

Exchanging rule-sets belonging to different rule-language families may
be assumed to be non-trivial
in the general case. To what extent RIF-based technology, or any
technology, can make such exchange
a reliable and straightforward process is difficult to say. Obviously,
therefore, we do not contemplate
making such support a critical success factor for the RIF. Having said
that, however, we do believe that
the possibilities for developing technologies for this kind of rule
exchange may be enhanced by the
development of the RIF.

Received on Thursday, 18 May 2006 16:03:14 UTC