RIF support for URW3 recommendations

Dear URW3 alumni,

 

I am writing to you from Beijing where I am attending W3C meetings and
the WWW conference.  I had a chance to talk with Ivan Herman, the W3C
Semantic Web lead, and Christian de Sainte Marie, the chair of the RIF
working group, about the work of the URW3 XG.  From very brief
discussions, it appears that our conclusions about the need to specify
uncertainty reasoning information should be supported by the RIF logic
framework and provide a means to include uncertainty information as
annotations.  

 

The RIF group just published a set of working drafts that would form
the basis for these annotations.  The announcement of the drafts is
currently listed under the center news section of the W3C home page,
but for convenience I am also including it below.

 

Three RIF Working Drafts Published

2008-04-15: The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group
<http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg.html>
(http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg.html) published three drafts today:

*	RIF Basic Logic Dialect (RIF-BLD)
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-bld-20080415/>
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-bld-20080415/)
*	RIF Framework for Logic Dialects (RIF-FLD)
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-fld-20080415/>
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-fld-20080415/)
*	RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility (RIF-RDF-OWL)
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-rdf-owl-20080415/>
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-rdf-owl-20080415/)

These drafts help solidify the "pure logic rules" branch of RIF, which
is distinct from the "production rules" branch (on which a Working
Draft is expected within the next 6 months). Both branches share "RIF
Core" (also expected within the next 6 months). The Framework document
(FLD) specifies how the various logic dialects relate, while the Basic
Logic Dialect (BLD) provides an interlingua for rule languages
providing approximately "Horn" expressivity. The third document
specifies how BLD can be logically combined with RDF and OWL.

The URW3 recommendations identify the need and support for

-          a standard representation ... to unambiguously identify the
formalism ... for assigning other uncertainty characteristics and
values

-          defining different standard properties for each formalism

-          adjunct specification(s) ... for the most commonly used
uncertainty formalisms

 

I am interested to see the thoughts of URW3 participants on how well
the RIF work would support the URW3 recommendations.  This is also be
an excellent time to make those thoughts known to the RIF group.

 

Ken