Rule Interchange Format

Again ontoprise emphasizes its position as a leading semantic web technology vendor by early adopting important standards: OntoBroker 5.3 – released in June 2009 – is the first commercial product supporting RIF (Rule Interchange Format) world-wide.
RIF is the major standardization effort of the W3C for a web-aware rule language framework. The RIF working drafts provide a well defined semantics as well as an XML based file format enabling easy exchange of rules between rule systems such as OntoBroker.

OntoBroker 5.3 allows importing and exporting of RIF/XML documents. It supports most of BLD – the Basic Logic Dialect – defined by the RIF Working Group. BLD provides Horn rules plus some syntactic sugar like frames taken from F-logic.
BLD is designed as a basic rule language, restricting to language elements which are common. While Horn rules are widely used, RIF includes more sophisticated concepts such as default negation. A perfect match for ontoprise since ObjectLogic – ontoprise's F-logic 2 derivate – also goes for default negation giving an intuitive approach on modeling complex rules.

Additional rule language elements such as equivalence and forall quantification in rule bodies are included in OntoBroker's RIF support. For further reading refer to our online manual.