Towards a general web rule language

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.