RIF
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Rule Interchange Format (RIF)
Overview
The goal of RIF is to define a standard for exchanging rules among rule systems, in particular among Web rule engines. RIF focuses on exchange rather than defining a single one-fits-all rule language because, in contrast to other Semantic Web standards, such as RDF, OWL, and SPARQL, it was immediately clear that a single language would not cover all popular paradigms of using rules for knowledge representation and business modeling. Even rule exchange alone was quickly recognized to be a daunting task. Known rule systems fall into three broad categories: first-order, logic-programming, and action rules. These paradigms share little in the way of syntax and semantics. Moreover, there are large differences between systems even within the same paradigm.
The approach taken by the RIF Working Group is to design a family of languages, called dialects, with rigorously specified syntax and semantics. The family of RIF dialects is intended to be uniform and extensible. RIF uniformity means that dialects are expected to share as much as possible of the existing syntactic and semantic apparatus. Extensibility here means that it should be possible for motivated experts to define a new RIF dialect as a syntactic extension to an existing RIF dialect, with new elements corresponding to desired additional functionality. These new RIF dialects would be non-standard when defined, but might eventually become standards.
Recommended Reading
The official RIF documents include a RIF Overview that provides a high-level explanation of RIF concepts and architecture as well as a general survey of RIF documents.
A number of textbooks have been published on Semantic Web in general, including the theory and practice of rule languages on the Web. Please, refer to a separate page listing some of those, as maintained by the community. That list also includes references to conference proceedings and article collections that might be of general interest.
Tools that are listed as relevant to RIF
(Note that you can browse tools per tool categories or programming languages, too.)
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All relevant tools
This is a list of all tools listed on this wiki, and that are marked as relevant to RIF.