Copyright ©2001 W3C® (MIT, INRIA, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use and software licensing rules apply.
RDF Primer is a non-normative document intended to provide an easily readable description of the facilities defined by the RDF Specifications, and is oriented towards quickly understanding how to create RDF metadata using XML. @@ RDF1 @@, @@ RDF2 @@, @@ RDF3 @@ provide the complete normative description of the RDF specifications. This primer describes the language features through numerous examples which are complemented by extensive references to the normative texts.
This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use it as reference material or to cite as other than "work in progress".
1) Introduction
- Overview of SW (the what, why) / Overview of RDF (the how)
- Self Describing Web
- Web of Trust
2) Basic Concepts: @@ e.g. The Card Catalog @@
2.1) The @@ e.g. Card Catalog @@ Schema
Note: Note sure of the specific example, but I find it nice to start
out with examples to grab the attention of the reader (the who)
3) Identification: Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI)
4) Extensible Markup Language (XML)
5) Resource Description Framework (RDF)
5.1) Goals
- Self Describing Web
- Data Aggregation
- etc.
5.2)
Note: The thought here is to partition up RDF in terms of managable
modules the reader would be able to understand and describe each
modules, their capabilities, and examples. @@ show how they can be
mixed and matched (e.g. lego's @@)
- Basic Data Model
- Typing System
- Collections
- Reification
- Light Weight Ontology Support
- @@ Ontology Language (Web Ont?) @@
- @@ Roll your own (DAML?) @@
6) Examples
Note: Goal here is to step to 2 differnet individuals through the
creation of schema and instance data. And then in example 3, show how
these can be combined/aggregated to provide something that is much
than the sum of the parts.
- Example 1
- Example 2
- Example 3
7) Conclusion
Note: future of the web, how RDF provides the basis for this, etc. etc.
Note this is not a complete list of potentially useful documents, but rather a starting point
This document, RDF Primer, provides an easily approachable description of the RDF language, and should be used alongside the formal descriptions of the language contained in @@ RDF1 @@, @@ RDF2 @@, @@ RDF3@@ . The intended audience of this document includes application developers whose programs read and write RDF metadata, and metadata authors who need to know about the features of the language. The text assumes that you have a basic understanding of @@ RDF1 @@, @@ RDF2 @@, @@ RDF3@@ , XML 1.0 and XML-Namespaces. Each major section of the primer introduces new features of the language, and describes those features in the context of concrete examples.
Section 2...
Section 3...
Section 4...
In addition to the sections just described, the primer contains a number of appendices that provide detailed reference information on simple types and a regular expression language.
The primer is a non-normative document, which means that it does not provide a definitive (from the W3C's point of view) specification of RDF. The examples and other explanatory material in this document are provided to help you understand RDF, but they may not always provide definitive answers. In such cases, you will need to refer to the RDF specification, and to help you do this, we provide many links pointing to the relevant parts of the specification. More specifically, RDF constructs mentioned in the primer text are linked to an glossary located at the end of this primer. The glossary contain links to the relevant sections of RDF specifications.