Modularity in the rule interchange format

Abstract

The adoption of standards by the knowledge representation and logic programming communities is essential for their visibility and impact. The Rule Interchange Format is a fundamental effort in this direction that should be supported by users, developers and theoreticians. For this reason, it is essential to the community to discuss the recommendations published by the W3C RIF Working Group. In particular, this paper presents the semantics of Rule Interchange Format (RIF) of multi-documents, analyses it and some deficiencies are elicited. A more general approach is proposed as an alternative semantics for multi-documents. As a side important result, some relevant problems in the semantics of RIF-FLD are also discussed and possible ways out are proposed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.