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RDF Overview

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RDF Overview

The Resource Description Framework (RDF), is a key standard from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Semantic Web Activity. Key features of RDF are:

  • RDF uses URL’s (or URI’s) to provide a mechanism for anyone to create globally-unique names for resources (such as things, concepts, actions),
  • RDF uses a triple construct (subject- property- value) to build graph models of information,
  • RDF is dynamic and flexible for integrating information from multiple, decentralized domains
  • RDF provides no means for defining application-specific classes and properties, but these are provided by RDF Schema (which includes terms to create class/subclasses/properties/domains/ranges) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) (which can describe cardinality constraints on properties, transitive/symmetric/functional characteristics of properties, class equivalence, and define new classes in terms of combinations of other classes)
  • RDF Schema and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) are built on top of RDF and allow people or organizations to build their own vocabularies (terms) and ontologies (terms, their definitions, and relationships),
  • Together, RDF, RDF Schema and OWL support a level of machine-understandability (enabling inferencing) based on a mathematical foundation (a form of 1st order logic known as description logic).
  • RDF , RDF Schema and OWL can be saved in different formats, including an XML format (which is the standard default format) and also other more human-readable forms (e.g. Turtle and N3)
  • RDF datastores can be queried using another standard format known as SPARQL.
  • A good intro to RDF/RDFS/OWL/SPARQL and Why You Should Care can be found here http://www.rdfabout.com/intro/
  • Wikipedia provides a good overview of RDF at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework
  • For a simple tutorial introduction, see http://www.w3schools.com/rdf/rdf_intro.asp.
  • For a more elaborate RDF primer, see http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/ and the RDF official documentation is here http://www.w3.org/RDF/
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