XML.com: What Is RDF

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What Is RDF

July 26, 2006

Editor's Note : "What Is RDF" was originally written by Tim Bray in 1998 and updated by Dan Brickley in 2001. Recently it seemed like time for another update, particularly to relate RDF and the Semantic Web to the cutting edge of web development. We've republished the original in a new location and offer the following update. I'll leave to you, dear reader, the task of deciding how well Joshua Tauberer has accomplished the task of updating a classic. -- Kendall Grant Clark

Building the Semantic Web

On the Semantic Web (SemWeb), computers do the browsing (and searching, and querying, and...) for us. The SemWeb enables computers to seek out knowledge distributed throughout the Web, mesh it, and then take action based on it. Take an analogy: the current web is a decentralized platform for distributed presentations , while the SemWeb is a decentralized platform for distributed knowledge . Resource Description Framework (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. To the extent that computers make sense of HTML, images, Flash, etc., it's almost always for the purpose of creating a presentation for the end user. The real content, the knowledge the files are conveying to the human, is opaque to the computer.

What is meant by " semantic " in Semantic Web is not that computers are going to understand the meaning of anything, but that the logical pieces of meaning can be mechanically manipulated by ...

Original URL

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/24/rdf.html?page=1

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/24/rdf.html?page=1