“It is done – RIF (Rule Interchange Format) is a new recommendation standard of W3C and part of the Semantic Web stack.” That’s the word just in to us from our friend Adrian Paschke who leads the Corporate Semantic Web project at the Free University of Berlin.

RIF is a standard for building rule systems on the Web to allow translations between data sets in different vocabularies in a distributed, transparent and scalable manner. It’s important for linked data applications, for instance, as it’s only possible to find data using the same vocabularies, and RIF translates between them.

Described in the release announcing its publishing by the W3C, it is:

- A new standard for the interoperation and interchange between various rule languages and rule engines;
- A concrete XML serialization language for, e.g., model-based languages such as OMG PRR, OMG SBVR, and the RIF RuleML subfamily of the overarching RuleML language family;
- A standard for rules on the (Semantic) Web supporting data integration, and for business rules, making businesses more agile.

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