W3C RIF Recommendation Published

Today W3C published a new standard for building rule systems on the Web. Declarative rules allow integration and transformation of data from multiple sources in a distributed, transparent and scalable manner. The new standard, called Rule Interchange Format (RIF), was developed with participation from the Business Rules, Logic Programming, and Semantic Web communities to provide interoperability and portability between many different systems using declarative technologies. For more information, see the RIF FAQ.

The six new standards are:

• RIF Core Dialect, which provides a standard, base level of functionality for interchange
• RIF Basic Logic Dialect and RIF Production Rule Dialect provided extended functionality matching two common classes of rule engines
• RIF Framework for Logic Dialects describes how to extend RIF for use with a large class of systems
• RIF Datatypes and Built-Ins 1.0 borrows heavily from XQuery and XPath for a set of basic operations
• and RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility specifies how RIF works with RDF data and OWL ontologies.

Along with these standards, W3C today published five related documents: RIF Overview, RIF Test Cases, OWL 2 RL in RIF, RIF Combination with XML data, and RIF In RDF. The RIF Working Group is also preparing a primer and a revision of its outdated Use Cases and Requirements.