Re: safety and external predicates

I agree with Chris here.

First, I think we meet the criteria to answer. We are interested in 
CORE, if we implemented it we would do so via JenaRules[*] and we have 
some idea what Jena rule users do at the moment.

 From our point of view I see no reason to demand decidability. It is 
possible to write non-terminating rulesets in Jena through recursive 
calls to externs or through instance creation (c.f. Gary's thread on 
frame axioms). As Chris says, we would treat that as the rule-author's 
problem :-) A static checker that detected problematic rulesets might be 
a useful development aid but in practice I haven't seen many people have 
problems detecting such problems and fixing them in their rules.

One way of looking at this is as a conformance issue.

My inclination would be to define conformance with CORE just in terms of 
ground entailments over rulesets for which those are finite. That way 
both simple production rule implementations and simple LP rule 
implementations can be conformant.

For a ruleset with unbounded ground entailments a conformant 
implementation would be free to reject it as a result of static safety 
checking, raise a run time error, compute some finite subset or loop 
indefinitely.

We could describe a notion of rule safety in an appendix, e.g. based on 
[2] as Jos and Axel propose. My preference would be to make that 
informative rather than some sort of normative CORE-safe subdialect.

Dave

[*] As it stands Jena could not implement all of Core because we only 
operate over RDF (i.e. the Frame syntax) not n-ary predicates.

Chris Welty wrote:
> 
> 
> I still am not convinced that safeness is anything more than an academic 
> requirement for CORE.  I would like to hear from someone who is a) 
> interested in CORE and b) has some idea what an implementation is and c) 
> has some idea what users of CORE would need, to let us know if these 
> requirements matter:
> 
> 1) Decidability: is is important that RIF-Core have decidable reasoning? 
> That is, any compliant RIF-Core reasoner (implementation) will be 
> guaranteed to terminate on any rule-set?
> 
> 2) If decidability is a requirement, is tractability?  That is, any 
> implementation will terminate in worst-case polynomial time (or better?)
> 
> My general impression from talking to some potential RIF implementors is 
> that they treat rule-bases like programs - if your programs don't work 
> its your fault, go fix them.  However one important difference between 
> rule/logic "programs" and procedural programs is the amount of control 
> you have over the search strategy.  I think this is (a practical reason) 
> why decidability is considered by some to be important for these 
> languages and not for e.g. Java.
> 
> -Chris
> 
> Axel Polleres wrote:
>>
>> Two pointers here... the notion of strong safety in hex-programs [1,2] 
>> and Topor's considerations on  safe database queries with arithmetics 
>> [3] (cudos jos for the latter one)
>>
>>
>> 1. R. Schindlauer. Answer-Set Programming for the Semantic Web. PhD 
>> thesis, Vienna University of Technology, Dec. 2006.
>> http://www.kr.tuwien.ac.at/staff/roman/papers/thesis.pdf
>>
>> 2.  Thomas Eiter, Giovambattista Ianni, Roman Schindlauer, and Hans 
>> Tompits. Effective Integration of Declarative Rules with External 
>> Evaluations for Semantic Web Reasoning. In York Sure and John 
>> Domingue, editors, Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on 
>> Semantic Web (ESWC 2006), Budva, Montenegro, number 4011 in Lecture 
>> Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), pages 273-287. Springer, June 2006.
>> http://www.springerlink.com/content/f0x23wx142141v44/
>>
>> 3. R. Topor. Safe database queries with arithmetic relations (1991)
>> Proc. 14th Australian Computer Science Conf 
>> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.48.4845
>>
>>
>

Received on Friday, 15 August 2008 14:30:08 UTC