Re: Rules WG -- draft charter

On November 7, Sandro Hawke writes:
> 
> 
> As Dan Brickley mentioned, we've been working on a Rules charter, too.
> Here it is:
> 
>        http://www.w3.org/2003/10/swre578
>        (currently at revision 1.24)
> 
> It's still rough in places, but I think it gets the point across.
> Wording suggestions are welcome, as are questions about what is meant
> by some section or phrase.

Executive summary: rules and justification are at completely
different stages of development, and linking the two threatens to
sabotage any rules WG - please don't do it!


As is clear from the draft, rules are relatively well understood
theoretically, and there are already several proposals on the
table. The WG would, therefore, only (!) have to settle issues such as
expressive power and syntax (ever the optimist).

As is also pretty clear from the draft, the situation
w.r.t. "justification languages" is completely different - in contrast
to the detailed sections on rule expressiveness and syntax, there are
only a couple of vague sentences about justification. It is not the
case that "justification" is well understood theoretically (it is
still very much an open research problem) and it is far from clear
what form justifications would take (this might be heavily dependent
on the logical language as well as on the reasoning technology being
employed), never mind what language should be used for expressing
them.

If, as is stated in the charter, "The readiness and urgency in this
field are growing" and "The full benefit of the technology really
depends on the suite of standards being complete", then it seems crazy
to sabotage the rules working group by asking it to additionally solve
the problem of justification and justification languages.  Therefore,
in the interests of making rapid progress on rules, I would suggest
that the two tasks are NOT linked, and that a separate
interest/working group is chartered to address justification.

Regards,

Ian

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2003 08:32:45 UTC