Characteristics of RDF/RDFS
This design has a number of interesting features.
- Rules to allow for decentralised extensions
- Descriptive rather than prescriptive (contrast with XML)
- RDF vocabularies document claims about the world (not about documents)
- RDF is designed for data merging (easy when things have agreed IDs)
(this is 4 ways of saying the same thing; see the RDF Semantics specification for a mathematical account)