[W3C RIF] New W3C Rule Interchange Format Working Drafts

[Adrian Paschke <paschke@in.tum.de>]

Dear Colleagues,

Rule markup languages will be the vehicle for using rules on the Web  
and in other distributed systems. They allow deploying, executing,  
publishing and communicating rules in a network. They may also play  
the role of a lingua franca for exchanging rules between different  
systems and tools. The main purposes of a rule markup language are to  
permit reuse, interchange and publication of rules used e.g., in a  
Corporate Semantic Web to represent business rules, semantic business  
process flows, regulations, and policies.

2008 sees a major step forward for rules on the Web. The W3C Rule  
Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group [1] has published several  
public specifications for a new standardized Rule Interchange Format  
(W3C RIF) which is part of the latest Semantic Web stack [2].

The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group has just published  
five new Working Drafts.  Since the Last Call Working Drafts of RIF  
Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) [3] and RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility [4] in  
July, the group has been developing other dialects, components, and  
test cases.

The new publications are:



   RIF Use Cases and Requirements (minor changes)

   http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-ucr-20081218/


   RIF Core (new design to support both BLD and PRD)

   http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-core-20081218/


   RIF Datatypes and Built-Ins 1.0 (various improvements)

   http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-dtb-20081218/


   RIF Production Rule Dialect (PRD)  (operational semantics are complete)

   http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-prd-20081218/


   RIF Test Cases (early stages of test suite)

   http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-test-20081218/


Feedback and comments from the community at large are welcome and  
should be sent to: public-rif-comments@w3.org before 23 January 2009,  
2008. All comments (and responses to them) will be available at the  
public archive [5].


Thanks,

Adrian Paschke



[1] http://www.w3.org/2005/rules

[2] http://www.w3.org/2007/03/layerCake.png

[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-bld-20080730/

[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-rdf-owl-20080730/

[5] archived at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rif-comments/