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Annotated edit history of RDF version 6, including all changes. View license author blame.
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4 AristotlePagaltzis 1 [Acronym] for __R__esource __D__escription __F__ramework.
1 PerryLorier 2
4 AristotlePagaltzis 3 [RDF] is an [XML] language for specifying information about some arbitary resources. In [RDF], everything is expressed a series of subject-predicate-object tuples. The predicate specifies which aspect of the subject you are describing, and the object is the subject's predicate's value. In practice this means that the tuple "[http://www.wlug.org.nz/RDF], dc:title, WLUG-Wiki RDF" expresses "the title of [http://www.wlug.org.nz/RDF] is 'WLUG-Wiki RDF'".
1 PerryLorier 4
4 AristotlePagaltzis 5 [RDF] Schemas specify which resource types (subjects) and predicates exist as well as define constraints, datatypes, and various other metadata. (It seems to be a fad for everyone to be creating their own schemas. Please don't.) The commonly encountered ones are
2 PerryLorier 6
4 AristotlePagaltzis 7 ; [RSS] 1.0 (Rich Site Summary) [1]: to describe a site's content (very popular in the blog world)
8 ; [FOAF] (Friend of a Friend): to describe a person (name, email, homepage, etc)
9 ; DublinCore: to describe A schema for talking about documents (who wrote it, what is it about, when was it written, a librarians wet dream)
10 ; Geo: to describe an object's location using [GPS] coordinates.
2 PerryLorier 11
4 AristotlePagaltzis 12 There are also meta schemas for talking about [RDF], like [OWL] (the Web Ontology Language, for talking about relationships between objects) and [RDFS] ([RDF] Schema, for specifing [RDF] Schemas in [RDF]).
2 PerryLorier 13
4 AristotlePagaltzis 14 [RDF] is an extremely flexible language, but unfortunately it's too young for best practises to have been established (the [W3C] has reacted by forming a Best Practises working group). Many of the common schemas are still in a state of flux, and noone's quite sure what predicates to use for things or how to use various predicates. Another problem at the moment is that there is no obvious way to embed [RDF] data in a web page, just to link to it as an alternate or related document.
2 PerryLorier 15
4 AristotlePagaltzis 16 People complain that [RDF]/[FOAF] violate privacy, but the intent is really just to have a mechanism to talk about a person in machine readable fashion. For instance, it's common to include contact details about the author when publishing a document, stating their name, their email address and perhaps home page. Providing this information as [RDF]/[FOAF] enables computer programs to process this information directly. This way you could search documents by author or send them a mail without having to manually cut and paste the information. DashBoard is an example implementation of this concept.
5 StuartYeates 17
18 __WLUG related RDF files__
19 * [RDF]/[RSS] feed of WLUG members blogs: http://planet.wlug.org.nz/rss10.xml
20 * [RDF]/[FOAF] feed of WLUG members and their blogs: http://planet.wlug.org.nz/foafroll.xml
21 * Members' [RDF]/[FOAF]
6 StuartYeates 22 ** http://coders.meta.net.nz/~perry/perry.foaf [explore | http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/explorer/?foaf=http%3A%2F%2Fcoders.meta.net.nz%2F%7Eperry%2Fperry.foaf]
23 ** http://users.ox.ac.uk/~syeates/foaf-main.rdf [explore | http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/explorer/?foaf=http%3A%2F%2Fusers.ox.ac.uk%2F%7Esyeates%2Ffoaf-main.rdf]
2 PerryLorier 24
4 AristotlePagaltzis 25 ----
3 WikiAdmin 26
4 AristotlePagaltzis 27 [1] There are 9 incompatible schemas/DTD that claim to be "RSS", half of which aren't even remotely [RDF]-based.