Linked Rules: Principles for Rule Reuse on the Web

Abstract

Ontologies are information models which provide vocabulary terms or terminologies and associated meanings to allow the modeling of a domain. They are shared conceptualizations; this has never been more true, because in recent years they have been developed by community efforts, often including experts from academia as well as industry. Those efforts have been complemented by the standardization of formats and languages, such as RDF, OWL, and SPARQL, for representing and (re)using ontologies and data on the (Semantic) Web. Rules, on the other hand, are (seldom) used for knowledge representation (i.e. to define the semantics or integrity constraints). Rules are also used for other intelligent reasoning tasks such as for defining business logic and policies. With the prevalence of shared information models, it is possible and may be necessary to share and reuse rules. Furthermore, with the advent of the Rule Interchange Format (RIF), rules can be shared across many rule systems. We propose a set of basic principles and features by which rules can be represented and shared over the web so that they may be effectively reused and demonstrate several methods of rule reuse. Finally, we discuss how some of these features work in practice in the N3-based AIR web rules language.

This paper is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. CNS-0831442, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Award No. FA9550-09-1-0152, the Information Technology Alliance in Network and Information Science by U.S. ARL and the U.K. MoD under Agreement No. W911NF-06-3-0001.