June 28, 2010 – The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released a substantial portion of the new web programming standards it is developing to help make the web queryable.

The new Rule Interchange Format (RIF) standards for building rule systems on the web has been published to enable web developers to use declarative rules that allow for the integration and transformation of data from multiple sources in a distributed, transparent and scalable manner. eWeek Europe shared this information in their article, “W3C Takes Major Step Towards Semantic Web”.

Along with these standards, W3C also published five related documents: RIF Overview, RIF Test Cases, OWL 2 RL in RIF, RIF Combination with XML data, and RIF In RDF. The RIF Working Group also said it was preparing a primer and a revision of its outdated Use Cases and Requirements. Believing the web is evolving at a very quick pace, Sandro Hawke, W3C systems architect, suggested enterprises should get to grips with the semantic web as soon as possible.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.

Data Harmony is an award-winning semantic suite that leverages explainable AI.