RDF - W3C Wiki (original) (raw)

RDF, or "Resource Description Framework," is a data structure. It's a data structure with some special properties, that makes it interesting to people:

• RDF is a standard - Being a "standard" means that lots of people have thought about it, and lots of people are making things with it. People also write useful tools for standards. Being a standard, in itself, is a great thing for any data structure. A standard creates a medium for communication.
• RDF describes graphs - Being in the shape of a Graph means that it gets around a lot of problems that arise when you must put things in the shape of a tree. "Tree" views of the world are notoriously stubborn, and tend to reflect a particular perspective, interest, value, or goal. Graph structures are perfectly malleable, and allow for any arbitrary description of things, and the relationships between them.
• RDF data can overlap - RDF is designed so that if some data presents an incomplete picture, you can amend it from afar (see "NetworkedData.") Say there's a public database of baseball players, but for some reason it's missing their batting averages. You can attach batting average information to the public database. People still have to know about your amendment, and agree to use it. But once they do, the technology is not an obstacle- overlapping was already considered in the construction of the spec. Overlapping data can be automatically merged.

RDF is an essential ingredient to the SemanticWeb.

RDF is a data structure. It can be described in many ways. Perhaps the most common way of describing RDF is RDF/XML, which follows the RdfXmlSyntax rules.

External References:

• The W3C's RDF Primer.
• RDF introductions and overviews - several introductory articles.
• RDF basic authoring tutorial - a way to get a feel for RDF.
• Why RDF model is different from the XML model - by TimBernersLee

Local References:

• we need a space for listing applications, projects, use cases
• we need a space for tools that you can use it with
• we need a space for related technologies,

Discussion

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