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Overview

The W3C Recommendation for Rules Interchange (http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/REC-rif-core-20130205/ and http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/REC-rif-bld-20130205/) became recommendations in 2013. The RIF is a complex Recommendation that serves many purposes.

For the FIBO project, we want a standard way to express simple rules about financial instruments. Some examples of such rules:

1. If (and only if) a party owns an asset and also controls that asset, then the party owns-and-controls that asset.
2. If one arm of a credit swap is specified in one currency, and the other arm is in a different currency, then it is a mixed-currency credit swap.

These rules cannot be conveniently represented in OWL, but can be represented in rules.

FIBO is specified in OWL, and all sample data is in RDF. Therefore, the rules are to be specified with triple patterns.

RIF provides a powerful and comprehensive rule language. FIBO's needs are less extensive.

This project includes two basic pieces:

1. Definition of a subset of RIF (Called FIBO-RIF) that specifies just the part of RIF that FIBO expects to use.
2. A translator (in XQuery) to turn FIBO-RIF into SPIN (http://spinrdf.org/) so that it can be processed with a standard SPARQL query engine.

It is the intention of this project that other groups will extend the translator to support other rule engines. We will refine the definition of FIBO-RIF as needed to make rule support as easy as possible, while still covering meaningful use cases.