W3C Publishes new Rule Interchange Format for Business Databases
The w3c working group on Rule Interchange Format has this week published a new semantic standard to increase interoperability between data bases regardless of their technologies. Recently, rule-based technologies have attracted a great deal of activity, namely in the areas of business rules processing and rule based reasoning in the context of the Semantic Web. 
TheW3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group has published several public specifications of the new W3C RIF standard. The Object Management Group has published its specification for Production Rules Representation, which is being aligned with W3C’s RIF. OMG™ is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry consortium. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a wide range of technologies, and an even wider range of industries. People around the world are already working on implementing these specifications for business purposes. Also, business rules are beginning to play an important part in Web Services in general as well as Business Process Management. 
The Corporate Semantic Web research group at the Freie Universitaet Berlin has been deeply involved in standardisation. Prof. Dr. Adrian Paschke, who leads the CSW group, has co-edited several of the W3C RIF specifications. Together, they allow systems using a variety of rule languages and rule-based technologies to interoperate with each other and with other Semantic Web technologies. The drafts define XML formats with formal semantics for storing and transmitting rules between systems.
This represent a significant step forwards in achieving Tim Berner-Lee’s vision of an “intelligent” interoperable web of data that frees data components from their locations. Although much of the focus on implementation of the new standard will be on business processes, the potential for for increasing transparency amongst government agencies can’t be overlooked.
The new RIF standard will be featured at the RuleML 2009 symposium in a W3C RIF workshop in November 2009 (see http://2009.ruleml.org), co-located with the Business Rules Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.
SUBSCRIBE HERE