Re: Lack of a standard rules language Re: Toward easier RDF: a proposal

David, we did run a Lotico session almost 10 years ago in New York City on
RIF - W3C Rules Interchange Format with Chris Welty. It's still relevant
and might help you contextualize the basics and the situation around  RIF,
industry and community adoption or lack thereof. You can find a link to the
slides and a live recording in the page.

http://www.lotico.com/index.php/RIF_-_W3C_Rules_Interchange_Format_with_Chris_Welty

enjoy, Marco



On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 8:18 AM David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:

> On 11/25/18 1:34 PM, Paul Tyson wrote:
> > On Thu, 2018-11-22 at 14:47 +0000, Nathan Rixham wrote:
> >> Yes, N3 immediately addresses multiple points from the opening thread.
> >>
> >> It's a great starting (and ending?) point, to this
> >
> > The original defect report ("Lack of a standard rules language") is
> > wrong. RIF has been in the SemWeb stack for a long time.
>
> But RIF is *not* a rules language, AFAIK.  It is a rules *interchange*
> format, to allow various different rules languages to be exchanged.  As
> the first sentence of the Introduction of the RIF Overview clearly states:
> https://www.w3.org/TR/rif-overview/
>
>    "The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) . . . [is] a standard
>    for exchanging rules among rule systems, in particular
>    among Web rule engines. RIF focused on exchange rather
>    than trying to develop a single one-fits-all rule language
>    because, in contrast to other Semantic Web standards, such
>    as RDF, OWL, and SPARQL, it was immediately clear that a
>    single language would not satisfy the needs of many popular
>    paradigms for using rules in knowledge representation and
>    business modeling."
>
> Am I missing something?
>
> > It has of
> > course been largely ignored while practitioners invent special-case
> > solutions.
>
> Why has it been ignored?  It would be useful to learn.
>
> > RIF is directly compatible with XML, RDF, and OWL, which means you have
> > a lot of basic tooling to process it. It covers practically all rule
> > styles anyone would want, and includes a standard extension mechanism.
> >
> > My only complaint about RIF is that, due to timing of the working
> > groups, it is not fully interoperable with SPARQL. Also for the same
> > reason, there is some disconnect between RIF datatypes and built-ins,
> > and the XSD datatypes and xpath functions. It's been quite a while since
> > I worked in this area so I don't recall the details.
> >
> > That should be the starting point on this topic: re-open a working group
> > on RIF to make it capable of expressing SPARQL constructs, and resolve
> > the datatype and built-in discrepancies with other W3C specs.
>
> Suggestion noted.  But if you think RIF should fill this need then it
> would be wise also to understand why RIF has not had broader uptake
> already.
>
> Thanks,
> David Booth
>
>

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Marco Neumann
KONA