RE: Rules WG -- draft charter -- NAF

At 11:36 AM +0100 11/18/03, Wagner, G.R. wrote:
>>  WOWG looked for a way to do this, and realized we would not be 
>>able to do it --
>>  I don't see why the rules group would expect success
>
>I don't see why the rules group should fail only because WOWG has failed
>to do this.
>
>WOWG could afford to fail here, because the issue at stake was not
>essential for the WOWG folks/mission, but for web rules this issue
>is essential!
>
>>  unless they could start from an existing solution -- and I've seen
>>  no proposal with a solution that seems workable.
>
>But obviously there are (partial?) solutions, such as in N3/cwm and
>in Buchingae/Bossam.
>
>And Benjamin and Drew have made a clear point that a semantic web
>query and rules processor does need a well-defined scope of the
>underlying knowledge base, so the concepts of closure/failure
>are applicable.
>
>-Gerd

Gerd-
   As we learned in WOWG (and RDF Core and lots of others), standards 
groups are terrible places to do research and to reach consensus on 
"big" issues -- I think it would make sense to hold some workshops 
focused specifically on this issue and see if there is some emerging 
consensus on how to proceed.  There is no proposal I've seen yet that 
has a large community saying "this is the one to start from" and thus 
I think it too early to start a formal WG on rules.  Getting work 
going on this area is timely and crucial, but standardization should 
be LATE in the game, and frankly I don't see enough consensus in the 
rules area to convince me that starting now makes sense -- 6 months 
or a year from now, with some energy put into this dialog first -- 
that makes sense to me (esp if a couple of focal issues - say NAF and 
justifications - were focused on and some sort of note got published 
that made it clear a lot of people agreed on an approach).
  -JH
-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)

Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2003 08:22:10 UTC