A natural and intuitive form to encode much knowledge is as a set of rules. Rule based languages, frameworks and systems come in many varieties and differ in many important characteristics, yet they also enjoy many similarities. Every since the development of KIF in the early 1990s, people have worked toward developing a good rule interlingua that could be used as a high-level specification for a set of rules and also to support translation from one rule-based system to another. Other major efforts include Common Logic and RuleML. The newest effort is being undertaken by a World Wide Web Consortium group that is working to define a rule interlingua based on W3C standards.

The W3C’s Rule Interchange Format Working Group has published a second draft og its RIF Use Cases and Requirements document. The RIF group’s charter is to develop a rule language that will allow rules to be translated between rule languages and thus transferred between rule systems. As a first step, this document describes ten use cases representative of the application scenarios that the RIF is intended to support and identifies 17 requirements derived from them.

You can get a detailed view of the workings of the group and the issues it’s been wresting with from the RIF-WG Wiki or the public-rif-wg@w3.org archive. Comments on the use cases document are sought through September 8, 2006.

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