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RDF resources
RDF
The World Wide Web's Consortium's RDF page gives an overview of the specification and lists other resources.
Metadata and resource description
This W3C site focuses on the metadata working group's activities with timelines, objectives, and recommended reading.
RDF FAQ
A list of frequently asked questions and answers about RDF from the W3C.
Dave Beckett's RDF resources
Lots of links about RDF.
RDF-Dev
This mailing list is for developers of RDF-related applications.
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What it is
Resource Description Framework (RDF) consists of two emerging standards--RDF Model and Syntax and RDF Schema--that provide the underlying structure for encoding, exchanging, and reusing human-readable and machine-understandable metadata on the Web.
Metadata is information about information. A traditional metadata example would be a library's lookup system--typically an electronic version of the old card catalog system. You could use this system to find a book that you're looking for--searching by metadata such as title, author, or subject matter to pin down its location in the stacks--or you could search through every book in the library one by one until you found it. Obviously, the metadata approach would help you find your book much more quickly.
Why it's important
Currently, most Web builders use HTML <META> tags to describe their pages, and Web robots troll the Web picking up this information. But this method often leads to ineffective search results, as anyone who has searched the Web knows. A single search may return hundreds of thousands, even millions, of pages that sometimes have nothing to do with the search terms.
In fact, search engines are pretty dumb when it comes to "understanding" the information that's given to them. For instance, the statement "Bill Clinton is the president of the United States" means the same thing to us as "The president of the United States is Bill Clinton." But to a computer, the statements are completely different. RDF associates unambiguous methods of expressing these statements so that a machine can "understand" that they have the same meaning.
While RDF's potential to improve searching on the Web is immense, that's not the only way metadata will improve the Web. For starters, it will describe individual elements such as pages, images, and multimedia files and describe the relationships between these items, thereby making site maps easy to create. Metadata on the Web will also boost e-commerce by describing products, terms of sale, or delivery mechanisms.
The library community is already sharing a 15-set metadata schema with the Dublin Core initiative. This will let libraries exchange electronic catalog systems--in essence creating one huge library catalog on the Web.
Where it's at (as of 11/3/98)
The metadata working group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently revised public drafts of the two RDF-related standards. In October 1998, it published the RDF Model and Syntax Specification and the RDF Schema Specification to define metadata on the Web.
| RDF timeline |
| 10/96: |
W3C recommends PICS, which leads to general discussions of resource description |
| 10/97: |
Draft of RDF released |
| 8/98: |
Working drafts of RDF published |
Eric Miller, cochair of the Model and Syntax working group, expects the W3C to adopt the RDF Model and Syntax Specification sometime in November 1998. Work on the Schema draft is in the "last-call" stage until November 30 and is expected to be finished by the end of the year.
RDF grew from the PICS rating system, with many proposals influencing it, including Microsoft's Web Collections and Netscape's Meta Content. This means both companies are actually in favor of RDF. In fact, RDF is a core component of Netscape's upcoming information manager, code-named Aurora, which will be similar to IE 4.0's Active Channels and is slated to be a part of the Navigator 5.0 release.
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