Semantic Web Activity News

The W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group has published six Candidate Recommendations. Together, they allow systems using a variety of rule languages and rule-based technologies to interoperate with each other and with Semantic Web technologies.

Three of the drafts define XML formats with formal semantics for storing and transmitting rules:

• The RIF Production Rule Dialect (PRD) is designed for the kinds of rules used in modern Business Rule Management systems.
• The RIF Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) is a foundation for Logic Programming, classical logic, and related formalisms.
• The RIF Core Dialect is the common subset of PRD and BLD, useful when having a ubiquitous platform is paramount.

The other drafts:

• RIF Datatypes and Builtins (DTB) specifies the datatypes and standard operations (modeled on XPath Functions) available in all RIF dialects
• RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility specifies how RIF works with RDF, RDFS, OWL 1, and OWL 2.
• RIF Framework for Logic Dialects (FLD) provides a mechanism for specifying extended dialects, beyond BLD, when more expressive power is required.

The group has also published a new version of RIF Test Cases, and three new First Public Working Drafts: RIF Overview, RIF Combination with XML data, and OWL 2 RL in RIF. The Working Group asks all developers to send implementation reports, and other comments, to public-rif-comments@w3.org by 29 October 2009.

The new W3C Rule Interchange Format (W3C RIF) standard will be featured at RuleML 2009 (see http://2009.ruleml.org), co-located with the Business Rules Forum in November 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. There will be a tutorial about RIF by Christian de Sainte Marie (ILOG/IBM, co-chair of the RIF WG) and a keynote by Sandro Hawke (W3C staff representative on the RIF WG) "Bringing Order to Chaos: RIF as the New Standard for Rule Interchange". RIF will also be a topic at the RuleML/Business Rules Forum lunch panel on Web rule standards, and in the Business Rules standards session and Open Source Day. Implementations of RIF will be demonstrated in the 3rd Int. Rule Challenge at RuleML-2009, which has an open call for demonstrations/case studies/benchmarks/best practice reports and is explicitly calling for demonstrations of W3C RIF implementations. First demos on RIF by IBM, Oracle, ILog, have been presented last year in the 2nd Rules Challenge at RuleML-2008 and are available on the growing demo pool of the RuleML Rule Challenge website.

I will be giving a RIF talk at the NY Semantic Web Meetup, Thursday Sept. 17 at 6:30PM. See http://semweb.meetup.com/25/calendar/11199251/

The W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group has published six Last Call Working Drafts. Together, they allow systems using a variety of rule languages and rule-based technologies to interoperate with each other and with other Semantic Web technologies. Three of the drafts define XML formats with formal semantics for storing and transmitting rules:

• The RIF Production Rule Dialect (PRD) is designed for the kinds of rules used in modern Business Rule Management systems.
• The RIF Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) is a foundation for Logic Programming, classical logic, and related formalisms.
• The RIF Core Dialect is the common subset of PRD and BLD, useful when having a ubiquitous platform is paramount.

The other drafts:

• RIF Datatypes and Builtins (DTB) specifies the datatypes and standard operations (modeled on XPath Functions) available in all RIF dialects
• RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility specifies how RIF works with RDF, RDFS, OWL 1, and OWL 2.
• RIF Framework for Logic Dialects (FLD) provides a mechanism for specifying extended dialects, beyond BLD, when more expressive power is required.

The Working Group requests comments be sent to public-rif-comments@w3.org by 31 July 2009.

The RIF Working Group met for the 13th and final time at MIT's Stata Center in Cambridge, Mass., on April 15-17. The meeting was extremely productive, closing all critical path issues and forming a concrete plan to bring all rec-track drafts to last call by May, 2009. Among the notable decisions made, RIF will release a very minor change to the Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) - adding lists and removing a restriction on functions and predicate with multiple arities - as a second last call; a new version of RDF+OWL Compatibility (SWC) will be released also as a second last-call, due mainly to the addition of OWL-2; the rdf:text spec will be published, jointly with the OWL WG, as last call; the XML schema datatypes supported by RIF will be the same as those supported by OWL-2; all RIF dialects will support lists as part of the syntax and semantics. The last call documents for RIF Core, PRD, BLD, FLD, DTB, and SWC will be released in late May.

The RIF (Rules Interchange Format) Working Group held its 12th F2F meeting on Jan. 14-15, 2009, hosted by Oracle Corp. in Portland, Oregon, soon after releasing several working draft updates including the widely anticipated RIF Core specification and a new Test Cases document. The F2F meeting focused mainly on driving the Production rules dialect (PRD) to stability and last call, and also addressed open issues with RIF Core and with OWL Interoperability. At the current time, RIF expects to release a new Last Call version of the RDF&OWL compatibility document, with updates reflecting changes to OWL in OWL 2 (which is also in Last Call). For more detailed information on these drafts, visit the RIF WG Home Page.

The W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group published five new Working Drafts today. Since the Last Call Working Draft of RIF Basic Logic Dialect (BLD), the group has been developing other key dialects, components, and test cases. The new publications are:

• RIF Use Cases and Requirements: minor changes
• RIF Core: new design to support both BLD and PRD
• RIF Datatypes and Built-Ins 1.0: various improvements
• RIF Production Rule Dialect (PRD): operational semantics are complete
• RIF Test Cases: early stages of test suite

The Working Group is nearing Last Call on these remaining elements of RIF, and welcomes feedback from rulesystem users and designers.

Not satisfied until it had achieved perfection, the long-awaited last call drafts of the RIF Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) and RDF + OWL Compatibility (SWC) have been published. The drafts reflect the result of either widespread consensus on numerous technical issues or sheer exhaustion - you be the judge! The working group seeks feedback on these drafts as the last call status indicates the design is believed to be stable and complete. In conjunction with the last call drafts, the working group also published the highly anticipated first working draft of the RIF Production Rule Dialect (PRD), as well as the BLD companion documents Datatypes and Builtins (DTB), and Framework for Logic Dialects (FLD). Finally, a new, improved and updated version of the RIF Use Cases and Requirements (UCR), that now uses BLD presentation and XML syntax in the examples.