English is good for communicating between people (who speak
English); RDF is about making machine-processable statements.
To make these kinds of statements suitable for processing by
machines, we need two things:
- a system of machine-processable identifiers that allows us to
identify a subject, object, or predicate in a statement without
any possibility of confusion with a similar-looking identifier
that might be used by someone else on the Web.
- a machine-processable format for representing these
statements and exchanging them between machines.
Fortunately, the existing Web architecture provides us with both
of the necessary mechanisms; URIs and XML.
