[UCR] Black boxes, surprises and action 41

All,

Blackboxes, as in "RIF should include an extensible mechanism by which 
rules can consult external blackbox information sources or query 
processors", are not a contradiction to the "no surprise" (now known as 
"default behavior) requirement because they are part of the application 
specific information (such as: relevant data sets/data sources, 
vocabulary etc) that users of a RIF document will have to know to be 
able to make sense of a retrieved RIF document anyway.

So, either the retrieving party is able to process the RIF document, and 
it means that it knows what the blackbox "means" - and, thus, no 
surprise; or it is not able to process the RIF document - possibly 
because it does not know what to do with the blackbox - and it just 
implements the expected default behaviour - no surprise again.

This completes action 41 (if you wonder why I had an action to explain 
this, see background below :-)

Christian
------------
The background of action 41 ("csma to explain why "blackboxes" is not a 
contrdiction to "no surprises" requiremens") is the discussion we had at 
F2F4 about the requirement that "RIF should include an extensible 
mechanism by which rules can consult external "blackbox" information 
sources or query processors". Somebody raised the concerned that it 
would contradict the "no surprise" requirement (aka "default 
behaviour"),and I said that it did not. To cut the discussion short, 
Chris gave me the action to explain why.

I planned to do so, if still necessary, when the "blackbox" requirement 
or access to data sources would be back in the discussion, but it did 
not happen yet.

Received on Tuesday, 21 November 2006 13:04:24 UTC