Review of Resource Description Framework (RDF)

This is a review of http://ontogenesis.knowledgeblog.org/2010/01/22/resource-description-framework-rdf/.

The article needs significant rewriting. The key thing about RDF is that it describes graphs. This needs to be brought out more. In addition, although RDF is for describing properties of resources (metadata), more and more applications are actually using RDF as a model for representing data — for example in the emerging Linked Data Web.

More care should be taken to distinguish between resources, properties of resources, and the objects in the world that they represent. The example concerning Joe Bloggs being a creator is confusing. This doesn’t state that the creator of the resource is a person called “Joe Bloggs”. In order to do this we would need to introduce a further resource to represent the person, who then has the name “Joe Bloggs”.

Reference should be made to the W3C documents/Recommendations relating to RDF.

The relationship between RDF and RDF(S) should be made clearer. Is an additional article on RDF(S) required? If not, then this section should be expanded, in particular highlighting the fact that RDF does not, itself, provide vocabulary for describing classes and class hierarchies (often a key aspect in knowledge representation).

Some mention of key technologies that are available to support RDF: stores, parsers, apis etc. would be good. There is also no mention of SPARQL or querying.

The formatting of the article would benefit from some attention.