Resource Description Framework (RDF)
A must read for IA’s who expect that their projects will need to co-exist within a larger context.
- From [An Idiot’s Guide to the Resource Description Framework]
- The Resource Description Framework (RDF) – developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – provides the foundation for metadata interoperability across different resource description communities. One of the major obstacles facing the resource description community is the multiplicity of incompatible standards for metadata syntax and schema definition languages. This has lead to the lack of, and low deployment of, cross-discipline applications and services for the resource description communities. RDF provides a solution to these problems via a Syntax specification (W3C, 1999a) and Schema specification (W3C, 1998a).
For the seriously insomnia afflicted:
- [Integrating ontologies and thesauri for RDF schema creation and metadata querying]
- In this paper we present a new approach for building metadata schemas by integrating existing ontologies and structured vocabularies (thesauri). This integration is based on the specification of inclusion relationships between thesaurus terms and ontology concepts and results in application-specific metadata schemas incorporat-ing the structural views of ontologies and the deep classification schemes provided by thesauri. We will also show how the result of this integration can be used for RDF schema creation and metadata querying. In our context, (metadata) queries exploit the inclusion semantics of term relationships, which introduces some re-cursion. We will present a fairly simple database-oriented solution for querying such metadata which avoids a (recursive) tree traversal and is based on a linear encoding of thesaurus hierarchies.
- [xml.com: What is RDF?]
- A gentle primer, originally written by TimBray and later updated to reflect RDF 1.0
- [Figuring Out RDF Wiki]
- A Wiki about RDF, created by Raymond Yee
- [A Response to Clay Shirky’s “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview”]
- by PaulFord
- although more specifically discussing the SemanticWeb, Paul shows how RDF can be useful, and even co-opts someone else’s RDF ontology of geography.