What is 'RDF'?

RDF stands for Resource Description Framework and is a language for describing resources on the World-Wide Web. It has been designed to represent metadata about Web resources, such as the title, author, and modification date of a Web page. It could equally describe a web document's copyright and licensing information, or the availability schedule for some shared resource.

Although RDF was originally conceived for the purpose of describing resources that are available on the web, there is nothing to stop you from using it as a language to describe other resources that are not available on-line. Therefore RDF is often seen as a lightweight language for describing ontologies.

You can find out more on RDF by reading the in-depth W3C primer, or by reading the much shorter article What is RDF?.

Other Terms

A9	Algernon	ant	AOP	Artificial Intelligence
awk	BeanShell	C	Camel Case	Castor
Cladonia Exchanger XML Editor	CLISP	collabetition	cygwin	DAO
DOM	Eclipse	EditiX	Erlang	Expert System
Extreme Programming	Firefox	first class object	Fortran	FreeMind
Groovy	Haskell	HIBERNATE	HSQL	IDE
Jatha	Java	JAXB	jBPM	JDBC
JENA	JESS	JRules	JUnit	Jython
Kerberos	LISP	Malware	OMG	Prolog
Protege	Python	SESAME	Squiggle	SUMO
Swoogle	Trojan Horse	XML-Java Binding	XMLSpy