Overview

The RIF Working Group currently has six active Candidate Recommendations, but its charter will expire 30 November 2009. Ten Implementations have been reported, but only a few test results have been submitted, and the CR Exit Criteria have not yet been met.

Given the upcoming holiday season, we believe mid-January to be a realistic time to transition to Proposed Recommendation (PR). To allow time to complete CR and perform the subsequent transitions, the group requests a four-month extension to its charter, through 31 March 2010, to complete its work.

History

The RIF Working Group charter divided the work into two phases, with the group given two years (through November 2007) to complete Phase 1. The charter said that if Phase 1 were completed and sufficient interest remained, the Director was expected to extend the group to provide time for Phase 2. The charter suggested Phase 2 might include two language levels, with Level 2 reaching recommendation in June 2008 and Level 3 reaching recommendation in June 2009.

The Working Group had a slow start, taking 16 months to produce its first technical document. It took another 16 months to reach Last Call on that work. Gradually, the scope grew to include features beyond the Phase 1 deliverables, including several suggested Phase 2 deliverables. (In the language of the charter, these include: fragments of OWL, Lloyd-Topor, some of HiLog, actions, updates, and many additional datatypes and builtins).

At this point, the group has produced one Recommendation (jointly with OWL), six Candidate Recommendations and five WDs (which are intended to become Notes or left as WDs for future groups).

The group charter has been extended three times (1 2), setting new targets each time. While the targets have not been reached precisely on schedule, real progress has been made, despite significant technical and non-technical challenges. The current specifications are being well received by the community and offer a major step forward for the industry.

Meetings and Participation

The Working Group expects to have about a dozen active participants, going forward. The group is currently holding 90-minute telecons every other week, and expects to continue these as necessary.

Deliverables

Recommendations

See Candidate Recommendations.

Working Group Notes

Use Cases and Requirements

Being updated to track changes to the language

Test

Test suite continues to be improved

Combination with XML data

Specification for how RIF documents can be combined with XML data sources (Rec Track, but not expected to reach Rec during this WG -- lower priority)

OWL 2 RL in RIF

Explains how to use RIF in processing OWL 2 RL ontologies.

RIF Overview

High level overview and document guide.