Resource Description Framework (RDF)
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On the Semantic Web , computers do the browsing for us. The “SemWeb” enables computers to seek out knowledge distributed throughout the Web, mesh it, and then take action based on it. To use an analogy, the current Web is a decentralized platform for distributed presentations while the SemWeb is a decentralized platform for distributed knowledge . RDF is the W3C standard for encoding knowledge. There of course is knowledge on the current Web, but it's off limits to computers. Consider a Wikipedia page, which might convey a lot of information to the human reader, but to the computer displaying the page all it sees is presentation markup.
What is it and what is it good for?
July 26, 2006 Editor's Note : "What Is RDF" was originally written by Tim Bray in 1998 and updated by Dan Brickley in 2001.
What Is it
By now it's a well-known and oversimplified bedtime story: In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, and casinos, pornographers, and, incidentally, businesspeople the world over found a medium of unprecedented power. Many limitations of the Web are widely accepted: The W3C, the consortium founded in 1994 by Berners-Lee and other industrial shapers of the Web, has been working hard to change these four limitations. The first two are supposed to give way to a future of an XML-driven Web, which would improve the maintainability and flexibility of Web data. The W3C takes aim at the latter two with the Resource Description Framework (RDF), claiming that RDF will make the management and navigation of Web data easier to automate by providing structured Web metadata as counterpart to Web data. (See the sidebar for a note about the word metadata and other such elusive concepts.)
An introduction
Tutorial
Overview Although it was originally designed as a metadata data model, Resource Description Framework (RDF) has become a general web resource description and modeling language. It can be used for conceptual description or modeling of information stored in web resources. RDF can be used to create a machine-readable description about any kind of resource, because RDF files can be extended with an arbitrary number of external vocabularies.
Copyright © 1997,1998,1999 W3C ( MIT , INRIA , Keio ), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark , document use and software licensing rules apply. Status of This Document This document is a Proposed Recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium .
Model and Syntax Specification
Wikipedia
The Resource Description Framework ( RDF ) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications [ 1 ] originally designed as a metadata data model .