Corporate Semantic Web Co-Editors Help World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with Rule Interchange Format Working Drafts

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].

The Corporate Semantic Web Group at the Free University Berlin have been actively involved in this standardization effort and Adrian Paschke, who leads the CSW group, has co-edited several of the above documents.

[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/