Rule Interchange Format: Difference between revisions

Rule Interchange Format (RIF) is a proposed component of the semantic web. The World Wide Web Consortium is developing it as a potentially recommended format for the interchange of rules in rule-based systems on the semantic web. The goal is to create an interchange format for different rule languages and inference engines.

An ontology describes a set of objects in a machine-readable way; RIF rules describe how to infer new information from an ontology, how to combine it in a useful fashion, or otherwise manipulate and make use of it.

RIF describes a number of dialects, initially including a Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) and Production Rule Dialect (PRD).

History

The RIF working group was chartered in late 2005. Among its goals was drawing in members of the commercial rules marketplace. The working group started with more than 50 members and two chairs drawn from industry, Christian de Sainte Marie of ILOG, and Chris Welty of IBM.

Standard RIF Dialects

The standard RIF dialects are Core, BLD and PRD

Core

The Core dialect comprises a common subset of most rule engines.

BLD

The Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) adds features to the Core dialect that are not directly available such as: logic functions, equality in the then-part and named arguments

PRD

The Production Rules Dialect (PRD) adds the notion of forward-chaining rules

See also

• Ontology alignment
• R2ML
• Production Rule Representation - comparable to the dialect of RIF called Production Rule Dialect, although targeting modeling not run-time interchange.

External links

• RIF Working Group
• RIF FAQ