BLD: Frozen Drafts for Review

Comments by section, prefixed with A, B, C etc for referencing in any
discussions:

1. Intro.

A. I like diagrams, even simple ones, which help annotate the text for
many "casual" readers. Simple suggestion attached, although I should
probably make the terminology in this compliant with the doc text...

B. There seems to be a bit missing on (as implied by Jos' RDF+OWL doc):
the fact that RIF covers not just multiple rule types, but also deals
with multiple data model representations for the terms and facts used in
the rules. Possibly this is considered "obvious", but not to me. Without
this reference the intro seems incomplete. [And I see I have compounded
this by referencing an OWL+RDF RIF dialect in the attached diagram, when
the RDF+OWL is probably/mostly orthogonal to the rule type eg Horn Logic
+ RDF/OWL, PR + RDF/OWL, etc].

C. A thought occurred to me to encourage feedback (if this is a goal),
an idea used in RUP: make the chapter headings links to mailto to the
group for that section...

2.1.1

A. I could not relate to the examples like in 2.1.1.2 (but maybe I'm not
the audience for them!). 

2.1.1.1

A. Shouldn't signature name be defined before the term signature?

B. After reading about arrows a few times I think I got the idea. I
wonder if the authors might want to consider some simplification or an
appendix for dummies like me, explaining the rationale for some of the
definitions? For example: << For defining signatures, we need to
represent the context of the terms used in signatures, usually in real
life determined by 1 or more parameters like "John(lives)". To this end
we describe below the idea of "arrows" to indicate "context" for a term
when used as a signature.>> Generally things are much easier to
understand if you have an idea of the motivation.

2.1.1.4

A. Comments like <<RIF-BLD requires no extra syntax for declaring
signatures, since signatures can be inferred. Indeed, RIF-BLD requires
that each symbol is associated with a unique signature.>> would be nice
if the "requires" text linked to the section stating the requirement,
for traceability.

2.1.2.1

A. Similar comments as to 2.1.1.1 B. I notice we don't have an
"Audience" section at the start of the doc. If we did I think it would
say "Formal Language Specification readers".


Overall, the general impression was that this was a good model-based
definition for BLD, and nothing screamed "not implementable for PR".

Cheers
 

Paul Vincent
TIBCO | ETG/Business Rules 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-rif-wg-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-rif-wg-request@w3.org]
> On Behalf Of Sandro Hawke
> Sent: 19 October 2007 17:24
> To: public-rif-wg@w3.org
> Subject: Frozen Drafts for Review
> 
> 
> 
> Here are the frozen editor's drafts, for review:
> 
>   http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/swc/draft-2007-10-19
>   http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/bld/draft-2007-10-19
> 
> Our plan, as of F2F7, is to make a decision to publish these as public
> working drafts 11 days from now, on Oct 30.   Between now and then, I
> think it's okay for the editors to keep making small changes, and I'll
> produce color-coded "diff" documents from today's drafts to those
> updated documents.
> 
>       -- Sandro