
The RDF Advantages Page
(under construction)
What are the advantages of RDF over other metadata systems? In this page
we try to collect a list of some of them.
RDF Model Advantages
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The RDF model is made up of triples: as such, it can be efficiently implemented
and stored; other models requiring variable-length fields would require
a more cumbersome implementation.
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The RDF model is essentially the canonicalization of a (directed) graph,
and so as such has all the advantages (and generality) of structuring information
using graphs
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The basic RDF model can be processed even in absence of more detailed information
(an "RDF schema") on the semantics: it already allows basic inferences to
take place, since it can be logically seen as a fact basis
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The RDF model has the important property of being modular: the union of knowledge (directed graphs)
is mapped into the union of the corresponding RDF structures; this means
that:
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information processing can be fully parallelized
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in presence of partial information (an essential feature in a volatile
environment like the web) the output is still a consistent RDF model, that
can be succesfully processed
-
...
RDF Syntax Advantages
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RDF syntax is layered: the basic serialization syntax allows for quite a
powerful encoding, while still being compact (@@this can be further elaborated,
even in a mathematical sense).
-
...
Related Documents
RDF Bibliography On-line
Created and maintained by Massimo Marchiori (massimo@w3.org).
Contributions/comments are welcome.
Last modified: Mon Feb 1 19:28:22 EST 1999