July 6, 2010 - Fredericton, New Brunswick
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published a new standard for building rule systems on the Web. Declarative rules allow the 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 various rule languages and rule engines.
RIF bridges the gap between logic (Semantic) Web rules, supporting data integration, and reactive business rules, making organizations more agile. The new standard includes a concrete XML serialization format for model-based languages such as OMG PRR, OMG SBVR, and the RIF RuleML subfamily of the overarching RuleML (available in English only) language family.
Harold Boley of NRC-IIT's Internet Logic Research Group and the Semantic Web Laboratory led the editor teams that standardized the logic framework and dialects of RIF.
W3C Recommendations constitute the highest level of the W3C standardization process (available in English only), which uses consensual principles to balance the interests of participating stakeholders from the public and private sectors.
The new RIF standard was featured at the Semantic Technologies 2010 conference (SemTech 2010) in San Francisco, June 21-25, as part of the RuleML Semantic Rules track (available in English only). It will also be featured at the 4th International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML-2010) (available in English only), co-located with the Business Rules Symposium, which takes place October 21-23, 2010 in Washington DC.
For more information on the new RIF standard, visit:
- the Web site (available in English only)
- the overview (available in English only)
- the FAQ (available in English only)
