What is RDF?

Although most people have heard of RDF, it is often associated with its rather obtuse language--RDF/XML. RDF is nothing more than a very general way of describing data, but as with many things that are very general, this gives it both power and the potential to confuse.

The basic idea of RDF is to reduce all collections of data to 'nuggets' of information called triples. A triple is nothing more than 'some item' having a property of 'some value'. It might be:

Mark has an address of London, UK

or:

XTech 2006 has a venue of Amsterdam

By breaking things down to such fundamental building blocks, RDF can be useful for anything from knowledge management to database definitions, to marking up metadata about web pages.