In November 2005 W3C set up a Rules Working Group. According with its charter document the group "is chartered to produce a core rule language plus extensions which together allow rules to be translated between rule languages and thus transferred between rule systems. The Working Group will have to balance the needs of a diverse community — including Business Rules and Semantic Web users — specifying extensions for which it can articulate a consensus design and which are sufficiently motivated by use cases."

The purpose of RIF is to be a markup language for rule interchange.

According with the charter and UCR document RIF must follows a number of requirements. Here I look two of them:

• to provide an extensible format for rules. Therefore the editors should provide an extensibility document containing at least the following information:
  1. What are the extensibility principles of RIF?
  2. How a desired extension can be performed or why the intended functionality of the extension is not necessary for the practical interchange of rules.
• RIF must have an XML syntax as its primary normative syntax. Unfortunately the RIF Core Design Working Draft does not provide a normative XML syntax.

I already talk about these issues in one of my emails to the RIF public mailing list

The Core document states that The EBNF and XML syntaxes are derived from the abstract syntax. but there is no explanation on how these syntaxes are derived !

Next article will cover the Positive Conditions Language