RIF Chair's blog - latest resolutions & issues

Recently the RIF WG has been moving rapidly towards consensus on the RIF CORE. Several resolutions have been passed by the WG that provide a good sense of what the CORE design will be:

• Nov 4: The RIF CORE will be positve Horn.
• Nov 4: RIF CORE must have a clear and precise syntax and semantics. Each standard RIF dialect must have a clear and precise syntax and semantics that extends RIF core.
• Nov 4: For standard RIF dialects, model theories will be normative; in their absence it will be proof theories; in the absence of both it will be operational semantics.
• Nov 4: The RIFWG will define useful RIF dialects in Phase 1, e.g. including negation, not necessarily in a Recommendation.
• Jan 23: The CORE design in the first WD will not include builtins, slots (that is, keyword arguments in addition to positional), nor constraints.
• Jan 23: The CORE design in the first WD will include only the following XML datatypes: string, int, decimal, datetime.
• Jan 30: The WG will maintain the syntax of RIF (CORE and all dialects) as an "abstract syntax" (aka metamodel or ontology) in a standard formal language (like OWL), and mappings from that abstract syntax into XML.

The two resolutions from Jan 23 were important for scoping the first draft effort to meet our internal deadline of early March for a first WD. The third resolution is a very important step in establishing the extensibility of the RIF CORE design. More on this point in subsequent posts.