Session-Level: Intermediate-Advanced
Session-Type: Technology-Research-Application

Meetup with Chris Welty and discover Rules for the Semantic Web. The RIF rules standard is nearing completion as a formal W3C recommendation and various communities are beginning to implement tools that support it. In this talk Chris will introduce RIF, its design and goals, and discuss its potential uses on the semantic web.

Speaker:

Chris Welty is a Research Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. Previously, he taught Computer Science at Vassar College, taught at and received his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnice Institute, and accumulated over 14 years of teaching experience before moving to industrial research. Chris' principal area of research is Knowledge Representation, specifically ontologies and the semantic web, and he spends most of his time applying this technology to Natural Language Question Answering as a member of the DeepQA/Watson team and, in the past, Software Engineering. Dr. Welty is a co-chair of the W3C Rules Interchange Format Working Group (RIF), serves on the steering committee of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems Conferences, is president of KR.ORG, on the editorial boards of AI Magazine, The Journal of Applied Ontology, and The Journal of Web Semantics, and was an editor in the W3C Web Ontology Working Group. While on sabbatical in 2000, he co-developed the OntoClean methodology with Nicola Guarino. Chris Welty's work on ontologies and ontology methodology has appeared in CACM, and numerous other publications.

Note:
I understand the importance of rules to help us introduce Semantic Web technologies in high volume transaction environments where most tableaux reasoners most will likely fail. To help you decide whether or not this session is for you I have tagged the event with "Session-Level: Intermediate-Advanced". I emphasize the advanced part of the label here.
http://www.w3.org/200...

Michael Kifer, State University of New York at Stony Brook, did a good job in describing the efforts of the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group as follows:

"The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) is an activity within the World Wide Web Consortium aimed at developing a Web standard for exchanging rules. The need for rule-based information processing on the Semantic Web has been felt ever since RDF was introduced in the late 90’s. As ontology development picked up pace this decade and as the limitations of OWL became apparent, rules were firmly put back on the agenda. RIF is therefore a major opportunity for the introduction of rule based technologies into the main stream of knowledge representation and information processing on the Web.

Despite its humble name, RIF is not just a format and is not primarily about syntax. It is an extensible framework for rule-based languages, called RIF dialects, which includes precise and formal specification of the syntax, semantics, and XML serialization. In this paper we will discuss the main principles behind RIF, introduce the RIF extensibility framework, and outline the Basic Logic Dialect—the only fully developed RIF dialect so far."

http://www.springerli...