Re: An appeal

Anthony Finkelstein wrote:
>When I attended the workshop I understood its goals to be to discuss
>
>- "rule languages for interoperability"
>
>- "a language for sharing rules"
>
>- "a standard rule framework"
>
>I was motivated by the statement "rule systems from different 
>suppliers are rarely interoperable"
>
>None of this implies a single rule language or indeed a single rule 
>metalanguage!
>
>As a scientist I don't believe this is possible to achieve. As a rule 
>system vendor I don't believe this is good for technology or business.
>
>Anthony
>-- 

It may have been the unmentioned 900 pound gorilla in the room but...
another objective motivating many of the participants' contributions at 
the April workshop was the development of a Semantic Web Rules Language.  
Part of the NIST position was that OWL and RDF have insufficient
expressivity for modeling the knowledge needed for systems integration and 
for more interesting applications of machine reasoning over manufacturing
data.  For the current Semantic Web languages to be useful tools for
our domain, we need a compatible language in which to write knowledge
that supplements OWL ontologies and RDF data.  (What "compatible" means in 
this context needs further exploration, but I will start the exploration by
saying it does *not* mean: layered on top of RDF and OWL).

I agree with Anthony's effort at focusing the discussion on goals which
will drive future W3C efforts for rule language standards.  We should: 
* develop this list, 
* refine/expand on each goal,
* sort out the relationships among the goals, 
* decide which goals should be in scope for W3C work, and 
* create a strawman for what groups and workproducts are needed to
achieve the goals deemed in scope.
This would be much more productive than the current ongoing email arguments
on various w3c lists.

I suggest that we start the objective list with the three goals Anthony listed
above with one addition for the SW Rule Language.  Such a goal might read:
- "one or more languages for expressing rules for the Semantic Web.
   Such a language must be compatible with RDF and OWL".


-Evan

Evan K. Wallace
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
NIST

Received on Wednesday, 6 July 2005 19:05:51 UTC