Re: here's a draft charter strawman slideset, wrt W3C Rules WG

Benjamin and his friends did a siginificant work in drafting these 
principles!

I have two provisos:

1. It would be agreable to receive files in a non-proprietary standard, 
eg. in a W3C standard. Those MS specific standards are alomst impossble 
to properly view on non-MS software, and I find it boring an 
inappropriate to have to start Windows for reading contributrions.

2. I do not clearly recognise the central issue "What rules languiages 
what for". "Rules" means many different things that , I beleive, are 
better kept distinct:

2.1 views, or predefined queries (rfegardless of whether they are 
evaluated by forward of bac kwartd chaining, I fully agree with the 
proposal in this respect).

2.2 Integrity constraint-like rules, i.e. FOL-like or Description 
Logic-like, eg OWL, formuylas evaluated against a repository of factual 
data (eg database).

2.3. Ontology-like rules, i.e. FOL- or Description LOic-likre, eg OWL 
formulas considered independently of any repository of factual data.

2.4 active/reactive rules.



More on the various kinds of rules:

2.1 and 2.2 (since integrity constraints are perfectly realized as 
special views) pertain to Query Languages. Therefore, any activity on a 
W3C rule language for the SW should be tightly joined with activities on 
SW Query language(s).

2.3 is already investigated: OWL. The issue are thus (a) how to relate 
ontologies to views/integrity constraints, and (b) how to use a *same* 
formula either as integrity constraint (as explained above under 2.2) or 
as an ontology formula (2.3), as fare asw Negation is concerned cf 
Thesis 2 in http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/paper/15/ .

2.4 Active/reactive rules can *not* be tackled on the distributed 
Semantic Web as elswewhere. New research is urgently needed, cf .e.g. 
the (draft) paper attached to this message (in PDF, not in a proprietary 
format! :-). There, a fully novel approach to reactivity wuth a kind of 
Event-Condition-Action rules tuned to the Web is proposed. Notice how 
this approach is copuled with a Web/Semantic Web query language, so as 
to achieve the interoperability needed by programmers. Feedback is very 
welcome!

-- 
François