W3C Rules Interchange Format(Basic Logic Dialect) Chris Welty
IBM Research & RIF WG co-Chair September 17th, 2009 - New York,
NY Rule Interchange Format (RIF) is a proposed recommendation of
the World Wide Web Consortium to provide a format for the
interchange of rules in rule-based systems on the semantic web.
The goal is to create an interchange format for different rule
languages and inference engines. RIF describes a number of
dialects, initially including a Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) and
Production Rule Dialect (PRD). RIF can be viewed as a
specification language for data. The presentation language uses
the Prolog operator ':-', which places the conclusion of the
rule first and the premises afterwards. As a result, RIF rules
presented in this language are best read from the bottom up. RIF
also incorporates a slot notation indicated with brackets to
express assertions about the bindings that associate variables
(on the left side of a binding) with values (on the right side
of the binding). The semantics of