RDF Surfaces

RDF Surfaces specifies a Notation3 sublanguage to express RDF Logic, but including a classic negation. Using this classic negation, and the default assertion of triples, that is available in standard RDF, inferences and a subset of first-class logic can be defined by combining surfaces.

Using RDF Surfaces, the claim is that all of RDF entailment and rules and proofs can be expressed using one RDF Vocabulary (and not a combination of vocabularies). A first implementation of RDF Surfaces is available in the EYE reasoner.

In context of the Mellon project, the RDF Surface language can be used as a shared rule language used for orchestration purposes. In a decentralized setting rules can be written by many parties. This requires a safe execution environment with rules that have the expressivity of excluding some types of computations.

The RDF Surfaces language has also relevance when implementing policy languages. Also within this context multiple parties can create policies that could contain internal contradictions. Our experiments show that RDF Surfaces provide a valuable tool to express policy langauges and spot those inconsistencies.

In 2023 an RDF Surfaces W3C Community group was started to investigate the potential and the specifiction of the langauge.

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