Shared Rules: Knowledge Sharing Service by RIF Rules

In this paper, we introduce a new method for knowledge sharing. We call it shared rules. In the shared rules service, users or organizations represent their knowledge in Rule Interchange Format (RIF) rules and post them on the Web. The rules are shared with everyone and infer useful information for each user. This service can be regarded as implementing a single global rule-based expert system on the Web, and it has an uncertainty problem in rule reasoning, as in existing expert systems. In the existing rule-based systems, the uncertainty problem can be mostly resolved at the design and development stage, but in the shared rules service, the problem inevitably arises because rules are freely written and shared by various users. In this paper, we analyze the uncertainty problem and explain that the problem can be resolved using existing methods.