Re: New RIF drafts

Dan Brickley wrote:
> 
> Boley, Harold wrote:
> > This is referring to
> >
> > http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/FLD#Well-formed_Terms_and_Formulas
> >
> > Example 2 (A nested RIF-FLD group annotated with metadata).
> >
> > where it says (emphasis added):
> >
> > For better readability, we use the compact URI notation which assumes
> > that prefixes are macro-expanded into IRIs. As explained earlier, this
> > is just a space-saving device and *not part of the RIF syntax*.
> >
> > We tried to use a different (italic) font in the wiki for the still
> > 'meta-level' compact URI notation:
> >
> > <tt>dc</tt> ''expands into''
> > <tt><nowiki>http://</nowiki>dublincore.org/documents/dces/</tt>
> >
> > Obviously, this was not clear enough.
> >   
> Ah, thanks for the clarification.
> > I agree that XQuery, SPARQL, RIF, etc. should converge
> > on a common syntax soon.
>
> Of those listed, XQuery and SPARQL are both completed RECs; so RIF has 
> by far the most flexibility. Would it make sense for RIF to take SPARQL 
> notation as a starting point in any concrete syntaxes?

Dan,

The concrete syntax of RIF is XML. This is explained and mentioned several
times in the document(s). The presentation syntax, which is used there is
for the purpose of giving definitions and semantics, since it is clearly
not possible to use XML for that.

This does not close the door to the introduction of another human-readable
syntax, but, at least for now, the group has decided against that.  It is
likely that the presentation syntax will be "slightly concretized" to
simplify the job of writing test cases and such. But it is much less likely
that this concretized version will become normative.

But I doubt that SPARQL syntax would be suitable for RIF given its
multi-dialect nature.

Also, note that FLD (which was the subject of the original email) is a
logic framework document, which concerns itself with defining a framework
for RIF dialects. Most of these envisioned dialects are quite unlike SPARQL
in a number of very crucial details.


	cheers
	  --michael

Received on Wednesday, 16 April 2008 12:49:30 UTC