March 8, 2007

9:50 AM - 10:50 AM

Level: Business

Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a W3C standard format for storing arbitrary data on the web and elsewhere. It's particularly good for storing metadata about files and other machine-accessible resources. You can store handfuls of RDF inside the resources they describe, outside of them, in relational databases, in XML, or any place you like, and then easily combine these handfuls into a database that you can use for queries, reports, and graphs.

The ability to exchange and combine RDF from different places across the Web has made it a cornerstone of the W3C's "Semantic Web" plans, and it's already proving itself very helpful in accomplishing much more mundane tasks. Whether your data is structured or unstructured, typed or untyped, centralized or distributed, RDF just may make the job of storing and using that data easier.

• a data model, not a syntax; several syntaxes available
• if you can name something with a URI, you can assign it RDF metadata
• Building applications that can use RDF
• well-known RDF metadata: Adobe's XMP, FOAF, Dublin Core
• building and using ontologies with RDF/OWL
• RDF query languages
  

Bob DuCharme (www.snee.com/bob) is a senior consultant at Innodata Isogen. He is the author of Manning Publications' "XSLT Quickly," Prentice Hall's "XML: The Annotated Specification" and "SGML CD," and McGraw Hill's "Operating Systems Handbook." He's written over seventy pieces for XML.com and has contributed to Dr. Dobb's Journal, perl.com, XML Magazine, XML Journal, IBM developerWorks, XML Developer, O'Reilly Books' "XML Hacks," and Prentice Hall's "XML Handbook." Bob received his BA in religion from Columbia University and his masters in computer science from New York University, and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.