PR Transition Request
This is a transition request, and also serves as an agenda for the upcoming Transition Meeting with the Director. The official version sent 23 April.
We propose to publish the following documents as Proposed Recommendation:
|rif-core||Core||rif-core||RIF Core Dialect|
|rif-bld||BLD||rif-bld||RIF Basic Logic Dialect|
|rif-prd||PRD||rif-prd||RIF Production Rule Dialect|
|rif-dtb||DTB||rif-dtb||RIF Datatypes and Builtins 1.0|
|rif-rdf-owl||SWC||rif-rdf-owl||RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility|
|rif-fld||FLD||rif-fld||RIF Framework for Logic Dialects|
The anticipated publication date is 11 May.
2 Abstracts and Status Sections
The abstract of each document is below:
|Core||This document, developed by the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group, specifies RIF-Core, a common subset of RIF-BLD and RIF-PRD based on RIF-DTB 1.0. The RIF-Core presentation syntax and semantics are specified by restriction in two different ways. First, RIF-Core is specified by restricting the syntax and semantics of RIF-BLD, and second, by restricting RIF-PRD. The XML serialization syntax of RIF-Core is specified by a mapping from the presentation syntax. A normative XML schema is also provided.|
|BLD||This document, developed by the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group, specifies the Basic Logic Dialect, RIF-BLD, a format that allows logic rules to be exchanged between rule systems. The RIF-BLD presentation syntax and semantics are specified both directly and as specializations of the RIF Framework for Logic Dialects, or RIF-FLD. The XML serialization syntax of RIF-BLD is specified via a mapping from the presentation syntax. A normative XML schema is also provided.|
|PRD||This document, developed by the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group, specifies the production rule dialect of the W3C rule interchange format (RIF-PRD), a standard XML serialization format for production rule languages.|
|DTB||This document, developed by the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group, specifies a list of datatypes, built-in functions and built-in predicates expected to be supported by RIF dialects such as the RIF Core Dialect, the RIF Basic Logic Dialect, and the RIF Production Rules Dialect. Each dialect supporting a superset or subset of the datatypes, built-in functions and built-in predicates defined here shall specify these additions or restrictions. Some of the datatypes are adapted from [XML-SCHEMA2]. A large part of the definitions of the listed functions and operators are adapted from [XPath-Functions]. The rdf:PlainLiteral datatype as well as functions and operators associated with that datatype are adopted from [RDF-PLAINLITERAL].|
|SWC||Rules interchanged using the Rule Interchange Format RIF may depend on or be used in combination with RDF data and RDF Schema or OWL ontologies. This document, developed by the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group, specifies the interoperation between RIF and the data and ontology languages RDF, RDF Schema, and OWL.|
|FLD||This document, developed by the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group, defines a general RIF Framework for Logic Dialects (RIF-FLD). The framework describes mechanisms for specifying the syntax and semantics of logic RIF dialects through a number of generic concepts such as signatures, symbol spaces, semantic structures, and so on. The actual dialects should specialize this framework to produce their syntaxes and semantics.|
The Status sections are assembled automatically from maturity-specific and working-group specific boilerplate, indicating the document is part of the set of six RIF specifications, with pointers to each, along with changes since the last publication.
3 Decision to Request PR
Made 23 March 2010.
4 Changes since Candidate Recommendation
All changes to RIF-Core, RIF-BLD, RIF-DTB, RIF-SWC and RIF-FLD since CR have been minor, editorial in nature, and would not invalidate earlier reviews.
Since that publication of the Candidate Recommendations, in October, a problem was found with RIF-PRD requiring a small but substantive change. After making that change, we published a Second Last Call draft:
We decided to skip having a formal second CR for PRD, because all PRD implementors supported and implemented the change.
5 Satisfies Group's Requirements
The requirements have not changed. None of the reviews have claimed that the documents fail to satisfy the group's requirements.
The charter deliverables are: a UC&R document, RIF has one though it is not Rec Track; a RIF Core recommendation; a RIF combined with OWL and RDF recommendation; and test cases, the RIF WG is collecting and approving use cases and currently has 73 approved test cases and 15 awaiting WG approval.
The specification has normative references to the following W3C specification that is not yet Proposed Recommendations:
- W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 Part 2: Datatypes currently at Last Call.
We propose to handle this exactly as it was handled with OWL 2. See the SOTD of any of the preview drafts for more information.
7 Received Wide Review
See list of Last Call and CR phase comments :
At the first RIF LC (for BLD and SWC), we received 14 public comments, and for the more recent LC for the six RIF specifications named above, we received 36 more. No issues were raised in the public comments, one reviewer suggested the low public comment rate "mainly indicates lack of controversy". Indeed the 2005 rules workshop and initial RIF working group had more than 100 participants, and was fraught with controversy, so this seems an appropriate reading.
All commenters have reported being satisfied, except for three who have not yet confirmed receipt of our responses.
8 Issues Formally Addressed
The RIF WG addressed and resolved 100 issues.
No issues were raised in public comments.
To date, there have been no formal objections.
The group maintains a table of implementations.
So far 13 implementations are listed:
- There are 6 RIF-BLD implementations, including 2 complete and 1 partial producer/consumer implementations, 1 complete producer only implementation, and 2 complete consumer only implementations;
- There are 2 RIF-PRD producer/consumer implementations, both complete except for the import feature;
- All the 7 RIF-BLD and RIF-PRD consumer are also RIF-Core consumers, per definition. In addition, there is 1 RIF-Core producer implementation, and 1 RIF-Core validator;
- All the RIF-Core, RIF-BLD and RIF-PRD implementations implement at least some of RIF-DTB. 1 of the 2 complete RIF-BLD producer/consumer implementations implements RIF-DTB completely, and one of the 2 complete RIF-BLD consumer implements it completely using an external RIF/XML to N3 translator. In addition, an open source Java library implements all the built-in functions and predicates specified in RIF-DTB, except the casting functions and the guard predicates for the datatypes;
- There are 2 RIF-RDF-OWL implementations: one of the complete BLD implementation reported successful use of a OWL RL ruleset for OWL compatibility, and one implementation reports importing RDF with simple entailment.
- Finally, the syntaxes and semantics of two new (non-standard) RIF dialects have been specified by specializing RIF-FLD, in addition to RIF-BLD: a Core Answer-Set Programming dialect and an Uncertainty Rule Dialect.
11 Patent Disclosures