Why Rules, Why Now?
The area of semantic rules is perhaps the most important frontier today for the Semantic Web’s core technology and standards. Rules extend databases and ontologies with more powerful, flexible, and active forms of “structured” knowledge (as opposed to “unstructured” knowledge such as text), and have a number of close relationships to other aspects of the overall Semantic Web such as ontologies, query and search, policies and trust, wikis, and services.
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Recent Rules Progress includes:
- Major initial industry standards nearing finalization from W3C (Rule Interchange Format, OWL 2 Rules Profile) and OMG (Semantic Business Vocabulary and Rules)
- Demonstrations of radical technology advances in expressiveness and knowledge integration (e.g., SILK)
- Accelerating investments/acquisitions, e.g., by several of the largest software companies
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Organized by The RuleML Initiative
The goal of the Rule Markup Initiative is to develop industry standards designs for rules on the Web using XML markup, formal semantics, and efficient implementations. RuleML covers the entire rule spectrum, from derivation rules to transformation rules to reaction rules. RuleML can thus specify queries and inferences in Web ontologies, mappings between Web ontologies, and dynamic Web behaviors of workflows, services, and agents.
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