Sandro Hawke: RIF is Proposed Recommendation

The W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) is now a W3C Proposed
Recommendation [0].  At this point, after several years of development
with public feedback [1][2][3], W3C member organizations [4] get a final
chance to review it and vote on whether it becomes a W3C Recommendation.
The review period is four weeks.

RIF is the product of a cooperative effort among several communities
interested in "rule languages", but having different use cases, goals,
and technologies.  Participant background included logic programming
(including Prolog), production rules (including Jess and other Rete
systems), as well as XML, RDF, and OWL.  The result includes a Core
(intersection) language, along with a pair of extended languages
suitable for more specialized situations.

You probably want to start with:

    http://www.w3.org/TR/rif-overview

There are several implementations available, at various levels of
maturity [5].  I don't know of any that are both complete and ready
for production use yet, but I expect we'll see several in the next
6-12 months, and maybe sooner.

There is a mailing list for users and implementors (with minimal
traffic so far) at:

    http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rif-dev/

and a FAQ:

    http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/RIF_FAQ

If you have comments or concerns and want them to be seen and
addressed by the Working Group, please send them to
public-rif-comments@w3.org.  


   -- Sandro       (W3C staff contact for RIF WG)

[0] http://www.w3.org/News/2010#entry-8795
[1] http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/charter
[3] http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/Public_Comments
[4] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List
[5] http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/Implementations

Received on Tuesday, 11 May 2010 23:07:55 UTC