Title: Towards a general web rule language

Authors: Gerd Wagner, Carlos Viegas Damasio, Grigoris Antoniou

Addresses: Institute of Informatics, Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus, Germany. ' Centro de Inteligencia Artificial, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Caparica, Portugal. ' Institute of Computer Science, FORTH-ICS, Greece

Abstract: A general web rule (markup) language has several purposes. It may serve as a lingua franca to exchange rules between different systems and tools. It may be used to express derivation rules for enriching web ontologies by adding definitions of derived concepts or for defining data access permissions; to describe and publish the reactive behaviour of a system in the form of reaction rules; and to provide a complete XML-based specification of a software agent. Further uses may arise in novel web applications. In this paper, we consider the problem of how to design a general web rule language that can be used for these and for future emerging purposes. Given the great diversity of rule concepts and existing rule languages, such a language will consist of several overlapping sublanguages that share a common metamodel. The development of this rule metamodel is a difficult conceptualisation and integration problem.

Keywords: web rule markup languages; rule metamodel; reaction rules; semantic web; web ontologies; software agents.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWET.2005.008483

International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, 2005 Vol.2 No.2/3, pp.181 - 206

Published online: 22 Dec 2005 *

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