Monday, November 10, 2003

Web Rules, Okay?

DRAFT: Semantic Web Rules Working Group Charter "The W3C Team, with input from the Semantic Web Coordination Group, is presently involved in drafting a (Member Confidential) proposal to its Membership for a "Semantic Web Phase 2 Activity"...The group is chartered to develop a practical and useful rules language for the Semantic Web, along with a corresponding language for expressing justifications. The rules language will allow the expression of the knowledge that when certain things are true, certain other things must also be true; the justification language will allow the expression of the knowledge of how certain rules were used to reach a conclusion."

Dan Brickley had some interesting comments:
"What you might end up with here is an RDF *description* of a query-related data structure. Maybe handy for testcase-style interop, but pretty ugly to read and think about. I believe DAML Query works this way. My understanding of XQuery btw is that they started out with an XML syntax but now mostly focus on the non-XML syntax, since it is vastly more usable. My hunch is that RDF Query might go the same way...

Closest you can get and still be pretty is a kind of query-by-example, with bNodes for variables, perhaps decorated with variable names in a well-known namespace. Such RDF/XML would never be taken assertionally but used to ask questions. I think Edutella have something in this vein. Sorry I'm in a rush or I'd do the googling for links. Also this approach doesn't allow blanks for property names, since RDF/XML doesn't allow that."

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