Re: Rules WG -- draft charter - here's a NEW whole DRAFT

Hi folks,
I wrote a new whole draft of the charter, revising Sandro's V1.26 of Nov. 7.
This new draft has roughly 30% new/revised content.
    In it, I also used several of Harold Boley's suggestions from his draft 
of Nov. 8 on this list.

Highlights of revisions in this new whole draft:
- fixes some technical confusions/errors about expressiveness, e.g, about 
relationship of Horn to head existentials / b-nodes
- adds more about expressiveness issues including overall requirements, 
motivations, existentials, and nonmon
- flags issues for scoping discussion, including head existentials and 
negation-as-failure
- deemphasizes proof language -- makes support of a future proof language 
be a requirement on the rules language,
    rather than an immediate deliverable of the Rules WG
- more about the relationship to, and motivations from, Semantic Web Services
- updates the Joint Committee rules proposal's name -- which is
     now "SWRL:  A Semantic Web Rules Language Combining OWL and RuleML"
- general polishing

I invite discussion in particular about the following.  An important issue 
for the charter is:

Should the scoping decisions about tackling negation-as-failure or head 
existentials be made before the WG is formed (i.e., in the charter), versus 
by the WG itself?

As of now, I'm inclined to leave it to the WG itself.  This will simplify 
hashing out the charter document and hopefully get us quicker to the point 
where we focus on doing the actual work of developing the Rule language and 
associated deliverables.
We can just give the WG instructions to focus on producing a doable and 
quick first version, with OWL/RDF-ish Horn FOL as point of departure, and 
trust it to subset the expressiveness as appropriate.

Benjamin


________________________________________________________________________________________________
Prof. Benjamin Grosof
Web Technologies for E-Commerce, Business Policies, E-Contracting, Rules, 
XML, Agents, Semantic Web Services
MIT Sloan School of Management, Information Technology group
http://ebusiness.mit.edu/bgrosof or http://www.mit.edu/~bgrosof