Issue-12 and the next UCR draft

Issue 12 [*] is the proposal that "RIF should be usable as the basis for 
a Semantic Web rule language".

Given our lack of discussion on this since the last F2F I'm guessing 
that the default is that it won't make it into the next UCR draft. That 
would be regrettable.

A colleague experienced with W3C pointed out to me that the purpose of 
Working Drafts is not just a "heartbeat to show progress" but an active 
mechanism for soliciting feedback from the target community. For that 
reason it is sometimes desirable to deliberately include non-consensus 
issue to solicit feedback.

I would like to propose that we treat issue-12 in such a way.

Specifically, that we include a section under "Goals" along the lines of:

[[[
Proposed goal: RIF should be usable as the basis for a
                Semantic Web rule language

<emphasis>The Working Group would like to solicit feedback from the 
community on whether this should be an explicit goal of the RIF 
activity.</emphasis>

Discussion:

If RIF meets the other goals and critical success factors in this 
document it will provide a rule interchange format which will be 
semantic web compatible, at least in the sense it will be possible to 
exchange rules which reference RDF and OWL data.

There are already a large number of in-use or proposed semantic web rule 
languages (CWM, Euler, WRL, SWRL, SWSL, JenaRules etc)[refs]. It will be 
possible to transmit some fragment of these rule languages via RIF. 
However that on its own does not provide interoperability - a SWRL 
engine will not be able to execute an arbitrary CWM ruleset, nor vice 
versa.

The working group is currently divided on whether this is sufficient or 
whether some further step is needed to give guidance to semantic web 
rule developers and implementers. We seek feedback from the community on 
this issue.

By phrasing this goal as "provide the basis for ..." we are indicating 
that there is unlikely be a single semantic web rule language and that 
RIF will not propose one. However, it also says that RIF should go 
further than minimal compatibility and try to bring some order to the 
chaos of semantic web rule languages. For example, this might take the 
form of a recommended profile or small number of dialects, with 
recommended sets of builtin predicates and functions. This would not 
suppress the continued invention of new rule languages for semantic web 
applications but would provide a common denominator that developers and 
implementers could agree upon as a useful core.
]]]

The phrasing of this may well not be right (it's getting late over here) 
but it would good to get agreement, or not, on the principle of 
including something like this, separate from criticism of the word smithing.

Dave

[*] http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/track/issues/12

Received on Tuesday, 12 September 2006 21:28:08 UTC