Business rules, regulations, and policies are key to the operation of the private and public sectors. They provide a powerful business logic representation in many modern information systems. To enable automated processing, rules have been increasingly formalized in machine-readable languages, such as XML formats.
Rule documents captured in XML can, for example, be validated with respect to an XML schema prescribing their exact ‘grammatical’ structure and their use of XML datatypes. XML can thus enable rule interoperation between distributed business systems containing many different kinds of hardware and software to ensure they work together seamlessly. Rules are often the technology of choice for creating maintainable adapters between information systems.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) thus chartered the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group with the mission to produce W3C Recommendations for rule interchange.
In October 2009, the RIF Working Group published six Candidate Recommendations and plans to soon move these into (Proposed) Recommendations. Together, they allow systems using a variety of rule languages and rule-based technologies to interoperate with each other and with Semantic Web technologies.
Three of the drafts define XML formats with formal semantics for storing and transmitting rules:
The other drafts define builtins, interfaces, and extensions:
The group has also published a new version of RIF Test Cases, and three new First Public Working Drafts: RIF Overview, Combination with XML data and OWL 2 RL in RIF.
The RIF Working Group asks all developers to send implementation reports about the Candidate Recommendations, and other comments, to public-rif-comments@w3.org. The deadline is October 29, 2009.
NRC-IIT’s Internet Logic (IL) Group and the Semantic Web Lab have been working in rule interoperation since 2002. NRC-IIT’s Harold Boley, principal research officer with the IL Group, has coordinated editing of several of the above documents in collaboration with Oracle, HP, IBM, DERI, and academic partners.
