On 10/3/05, Joshua Tauberer <tauberer@for.net> wrote:

Hi,

As probably everyone on the list knows, there's a lot of negative
opinions of RDF out there, and it seems like some of this stems from a
confusion of RDF the XML format and RDF the general method for
expressing knowledge.  But, I haven't come across a deep explanation of
what RDF-the-method is that we can point people to so they know there's
more to RDF than the serialization format.

I know such a document may very well exist, but I figured I would take a
stab at writing one myself.  (If it has no value for anyone else, at
least I gained a deeper understand of RDF by writing it :-).  What I
wrote is posted at:

http://taubz.for.net/code/semweb/whatisrdf/

The goal was to introduce RDF from the beginning, show why it's useful
for modeling knowledge in a distributed way, and to give a basic
presentation of RDFS and OWL..

It's long for an introduction as I tried to be as explicit as possible
about what defines RDF (at least in my understanding of RDF).  A shorter
to-the-point version could be synthesized from this.

Comments welcome, especially if you think it was worth the time writing.  :)

--
- Joshua Tauberer

http://taubz.for.net

** Nothing Unreal Exists **