Dave Beckett's Resource Description Framework (RDF) Resource Guide

Resource Description Framework Documents

• W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF) activity page (Official)
• Resource Description Framework Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
• RDF Core Working Group published the following (press release, testimonials) as W3C recommendations on 10 February 2004:
  • RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised), Dave Beckett, Editor, W3C Recommendation, 10 February 2004
  • RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema, Dan Brickley, R.V. Guha, Editors, W3C Recommendation, 10 February 2004
  • RDF Primer, Frank Manola, Eric Miller, Editors, W3C Recommendation, 10 February 2004
  • RDF Concepts and Abstract Data Model, Graham Klyne, Jeremy J. Carroll, Editors, W3C Recommendation, 10 February 2004
  • RDF Semantics, Patrick Hayes, Editor, W3C Recommendation, 10 February 2004
  • RDF Test Cases, Jan Grant, Dave Beckett, Editors, W3C Recommendation, 10 February 2004

  The working group also previously published:

  • LBase: Semantics for Languages of the Semantic Web, R.V. Guha, Patrick Hayes, W3C Note, 10 October 2003
• Translations of RDF specifications (French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish at 2001-01-09)
• Web Architecture: Describing and Exchanging Data, W3C Note, Tim Berners-Lee, Dan Connolly and Ralph Swick - explores the common model where the RDF Schema and XML Schema designs meet as part of the semantic web technology. 7 June 1999.
• RDF Model and Syntax Specification W3C Recommendation , Edited by Ora Lassila (Nokia) and Ralph Swick (W3C), 24 February 1999.
• Why RDF model is different from the XML model, Tim Berners-Lee, work in progress, October 1998.
• Introduction to RDF Metadata W3C Note, Ora Lassila, 13 November 1997
• Metadata Architecture, Tim Berners-Lee, 6 January 1997
• W3C RDF Working Drafts Comments archive
• See also the Semantic Web section

These are related but not current RDF working group documents

• The Cambridge Communiqué, W3C Note, Ralph Swick and Henry S. Thompson, 7 October 1999 - "a report of the results of a meeting of a group of W3C Members involved in XML and RDF to advance the general understanding of a unified approach to the expression of Web data models."
• RDF Schema drafts: 2000-03-27 Candidate REC, 1999-03-03 Proposed REC, 1998-10-30 Working Draft, 1998-08-14 Working Draft, 1998-04-09 Working Draft, 1998-03-13 Functional Requirements
• RDF Model and Syntax Specification drafts: 1999-01-06 Proposed REC, 1998-10-08 Working Draft, 1998-07-20 Working Draft, 1998-02-16 Working Draft, 1997-10-02 Working Draft.
• Composite Capability/Preference Profiles (CC/PP): A user side framework for content negotiation, W3C NOTE, Franklin Reynolds (Nokia), Johan Hjelm (W3C/Ericsson), Spencer Dawkins (Nortel), Sandeep Singhal (IBM). An RDF application that describes "a general, yet extensible framework for describing user preferences and device capabilities". 27 July 1999.
• A Discussion of the Relationship Between RDF-Schema and UML, W3C NOTE, Walter W. Chang (Adobe), 4 August 1998
• Document Content Description for XML (DCD), W3C NOTE, Tim Bray, Charles Frankston (Microsoft) and Ashok Malhotra (IBM), 31 July 1998. Based on XML-Data and RDF. "DCD is an RDF vocabulary".

Resource Description Framework Publications

• Turtle - Terse RDF Triple Language by Dave Beckett, ILRT, University of Bristol [Disclosure: editor of this guide]. An RDF serialisation format based on N-Triples with some items taken from Notation3 (N3) and presented in a short term as an EBNF with examples and a background paper. Announced 19 January 2004.
• API for RDF in Java (JRDF) by Andrew Newman. A new Java API based on the APIs of Jena, Sesame and Sergey Melnik and intended to be a small and simple design for a common set of APIs that could be used across Java applications. Announced 12 December 2003.
• fSchemaWeb by Victor Lindesay. A web site providing a searchable directory of RDF/S, OWL and DAML+OIL schema vocabularies with both a browsable and searchable interface for people and web services including REST APIs for access by software. Announced 19 November 2003.
• Practical RDF weblog by Shelley Powers after the O'Reilly book of the same name. 21 August 2003
• The Semantic Web is Closer Than You Think, Kendall Grant Clark, XML.com. 21 August 2003.
• W3C Quality Assurance (QA) Matrix in RDF by Karl Dubost, W3C Conformance Manager. See also the related RDF Reloaded presentation. Announced 20 August 2003.
• Automatically generate a Web site map using RDF and Jena, Peter V. Mikhalenko, Builder.com. 19 August 2003.
• GraphSL: RDF Graph Schema Language by Sean B. Palmer. A proposal to allow validation of subsets of RDF graphs. 30 June 2003.
• Tracking provenance of RDF data, Edd Dumbill, IBM developerWorks, 21 June 2003.
• Semantic Business Model (SBM) by Eli Israel, Semantic World. An effort to provide high quality models of aspects of business and vertical industries in OWL. 24 April 2003.
• RDFMap - RDF Mapping Language by Chris Goad, Map Bureau. A set of RDF classes and properties for representing basic mapping and geography in RDF. See also the GeoInfo wiki page on the ESW Wiki. 15 April 2003.
• An RDF schema for topic maps by Lars Marius Garshol. An rdf schema that translates the Standard Application Model for Topic Maps into RDF with the one restriction that all locators must be URIs. 7 October 2002.
• The emerging semantic web, selected papers from the first Semantic web working symposium, Edited by Isabel Cruz, Stefan Decker, Jérôme Euzenat, and Deborah McGuinness. Volume 75 in the Frontiers in artificial intelligence and applications series, IOS press, Amsterdam (NL), 2002, 300pp., hardcover, ISBN: 1 58603 255 0, IOS Press. Announced 30 August 2002.
• DAML Query Language (DQL). First part of the work containing an abstract specification announced 29 August 2002.
• A Rough Guide to Notation3 by Sean B. Palmer. A guide to the experimental text-based RDF format including pointers to tools, examples, FAQs, features and history. 22 August 2002.
• IEEE Learning Object Metadata RDF binding (draft) with examples by Mikael Nilsson et al, 14 June 2002.
• One Part Code, One Part XML, Two Parts Knowledge by Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. in Intel Developer Services. 12 May 2002.
• The Languages of the Semantic Web by Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. in New Architect (formerly Web Techniques). 9 May 2002.
• Managing structured Web service metadata by Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. on IBM developerWorks. Builds on an earlier article using RDF to enhance WSDL, relating SOAP with RDF. 3 April 2002.
• Introduction to DAML - Part I and Part II by Roxane Ouellet and Uche Ogbuji, XML.com, January/March 2002
• Musicbrainz: A Semantic Web Service (PDF), Aaron Swartz, IEEE Intelligent Systems, January/February 2002.
• Benchmarking RDF Schemas for the Semantic Web (PDF) by A. Magkanaraki, S. Alexaki, V. Christophides and D. Plexousakis, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), Crete, Greece, 5 February 2002.
• Unparsing RDF/XML by Jeremy J. Carroll. An HP Labs Technical Report, HPL-2001-294 on issues, problems and techniques for serializing an RDF graph to the RDF/XML syntax. December 2001.
• Some recent Internet Drafts relating to RDF/KR/SW/... announced and authored by Patrick Stickler, Nokia Research. 16 January 2002
• Survey of RDF data on the Web (HTML, PostScript) by Andreas Eberhart, International University in Germany. A survey of various RDF data found on the web today. 20 December 2001.
• Closed World Machine (CWM) notes and pointers to the CWM Semantic Web and RDF program including examples, applications and utilities collected by Sean B. Palmer. 3 December 2001.
• RDF Declarative Description (RDD): A Language for Metadata, Chutiporn Anutariya, Vilas Wuwongse, Kiyoshi Akama and Ekawit Nantajeewarawat in Journal of Digital information, volume 2 issue 2, 6 November 2001.
• RDF Schema chapter by Mark Birbeck in Professional XML Meta Data, Wrox Press, 1 November 2001
• The semantic web: How RDF will change learning technology standards by Mikael Nilsson, feature in CETIS, 27 September 2001
• Markup Languages: Comparison and Examples - XML Schema, RDF Schema and DAML+OIL, Yolanda Gil and Varun Ratnakar, Trellis Project. 7 September 2001.
• RDFWiki by Sean B. Palmer - a python CGI script that creates a WiKi from RDF statements about resources. 5 September 2001.
• Sådan skrives metadata med RDF (in Danish), PC World.dk, 4 September 2001.
• Metadata giver masser af mening (in Danish), PC World.dk, 30 August 2001.
• Semantic Web Hints And Tips by Sean B. Palmer - tips for writing good data, schemas using RDF and RDF Schema. An ongoing project including a Semantic Web Tips Wiki for people to add their own tips. 29 August 2001.
• Semantic Web Mining Workshop 2001 at ECML'01, in Freiburg, Germany. Contains online proceedings. 3 September 2001.
• An Axiomatic Semantics for RDF, RDF Schema, and DAML+OIL by Richard Fikes and Deborah L. McGuinness. See also older versions. 27 August 2001.
• A Proposal for Encoding Logic in RDF/DAML by Drew McDemott, Jonathan Borden, Mark Burstein, Doug Smith and Richard Waklinger. Only available in PostScript at present. 8 August 2001.
• RDF Calendar taskforce by Leigh Dodds in XML-Deviant, XML.com, 25 July 2001
• RDF Applications with Prolog (part 2 of series) by Bijan Parsia in XML.com - second article in the series on RDF and prolog, exploring using RDF with SWI-Prolog. See also part 1. 25 July 2001
• RDF Graph Modeling Language (RGML) by John Punin. A specification and schema for graphs in RDF as well as a note on adding graph rules using RGML and Logic Primitives from rules written in Notation3. 18 July 2001.
• Metamodeling Architecture of Web Ontology Languages - PDF by Ian Horrocks and Jeff Z. Pan paper proposing a fixed layer metamodeling architecture for RDF Schema (RDFS(FA)) ... demonstrates how the problems of RDF Schema can be solved under RDFS(FA), paper to be presented at Semantic Web Symposium, Stanford. Announced 10 July 2001.
• Professional XML Meta Data, (Amazon US), Dodds et al., Wrox Press, ISBN 1861004516, July 2001.
• Thinking XML Series, Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. on IBM developerWorks. Parts of the series: Part 1: The Semantics, Part 2: XML meets semantics, Part 3: Walking the semantic beat. Latest part May 2001.
• Basic XML and RDF techniques for knowledge management series, Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. on IBM developerWorks. Parts of the series: Part 1: Generate RDF using XSLT, Part 2: Combining files into an RDF model, and basic RDF querying, Part 3: Knowledge from semantics, Part 4: Once again round the block - An updated survey of semantic transparency in XML, Part 5: Defining RDF and DAML+OIL, Part 6: RDF Query using Versa, Part 7: Review and relevance of the techniques discussed. Latest part July 2002.
• Simplified XML Syntax for RDF by Jonathan Borden Open Healthcare Group - a proposal for a new syntax based on a tree regex (such as RELAXNG or TREX). 17 June 2001.
• Powering Web Services Through Metadata - How RDF could help web services standards, Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc., Web Services Architect, 13 June 2001.
• RDF, XML and the OAI Protocol: Avoiding Mixing Apples and Oranges, Carl Lagoze and John Perkins, 3 June 2001.
• RDF model revisited, or: How to make the most out of Reifications and Containers - PDF by Wolfram Conen and Reinhold Klapsing, University of Essen, Germany. 31 May 2001.
• Propositions of Conventions and Ontologies for the Resource Description Framework (RDF), Phillippe Martin, 30 May 2001.
• Propositions of Conventions for RDF (PostScript), Phillippe Martin - conventions for naming properties, classes, structural conventions for relations, working with context and constraints, logic, collections, 28 May 2001.
• Creating the Semantic Web with RDF: Professional Developer's Guide book (Amazon.com) by Johan Hjelm, W3C/Ericsson, ISBN: 0-471-40259-1, John Wiley & Sons, 3 May 2001
• Survey of RDF/Triple Data Stores, by Art Barstow, W3C/HP as announced on www-rdf-interest. 22 May 2001.
• Evaluation And Report Language (EARL) V0.9 by Daniel Dardailler and Sean B. Palmer of the W3C WAI ERT group - an RDF based framework for recording, transferring and processing data about automatic and manual evaluations/tests of resources or tools. 26 April 2001.
• An Introduction to Prolog and RDF (part 1 of series) by Bijan Parsia in XML.com - first article in series introducing using Prolog for RDF. See also part 2. 25 April 2001.
• XML MIME Transformation Protocol (XMTP) - An RDF XML mapping of RFC 822/MIME by Jonathan Borden Open Healthcare Group - updated version which represents MIME as an XML Grove/Infoset as well as RDF Grove/Graph and includes java implementation. 24 April 2001.
• Berners-Lees vision: Det meningsgivende web (in Danish), PC World.dk, 23 April 2001.
• Using RDF for description and modeling in Web services, Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. presentation given at W3C Workshop on Web Services, San Jose, California, USA, 12 April 2001.
• RDF Process Profile (RPP) strawman lightweight extensible description format for processes, Danny Ayers, 11 April 2001.
• DAML+OIL Language of March 2001. A revision of the ontology language specification, examples and related now including XML Schema data types. 28 March 2001.
• RDF Protocol by Ken MacLeod - experiments with creating an conventions for passing bits of RDF around. 24 March 2001.
• Querying and Transforming RDF by Stefan Kokkelink, University of Osnabrueck, Germany - work considering RDF approaches to query and transformation of graphs in a similar fashion to XPath and XQuery for XML document trees. See the working papers Quick introduction to RDFPath (PDF) and Transforming RDF with RDFPath (PDF). 16 March 2001.
• Jena: Implementing the RDF M&S Specification by Brian McBride, HP Labs, Bristol - a pre-print of a paper about Brian's Jena system with discussion of hot RDF topics such as identify, resources, reification. 8 March 2001.
• Information Modelling using RDF - Constructs for Modular Description of Complex Systems (PDF) by Graham Klyne, Baltimore Technologies. 5 March 2001.
• Networked Knowledge Representation and Exchange using UML and RDF, Stephen Cranefield, in Journal of Digital information, volume 1 issue 8, 15 February 2001.
• MetaNet - A Metadata Term Thesaurus to Enable Semantic Interoperability Between Metadata Domains, Jane Hunter, DSTC, University of Queensland, in Journal of Digital information, volume 1 issue 8, 8 February 2001.
• How Would You Like That Served? - overview of Composite Capabilities/Preference Profiles (CC/PP) as a simple RDF application by Didier Martin, XML.com, 31 January 2001.
• Using Protégé-2000 to Edit RDF - a paper comparing the RDF semantic model and the Protégé semantic model in Protégé-2000, Stanford Medical Informatics, Stanford University, USA, 30 January 2001.
• What is RDF? by Tim Bray, XML.com - new version of RDF and Metadata of June 1998 with updates by Dan Brickley to reflect changes to the specification and RDF use. 24 January 2001.
• Understanding RDF by Dan Brickley based on a presentation at the EC Metadata Workshop in April 1999. 22 January 2000.
• XRDF - an eXtensible Resource Description Framework paper by Wolfram Conen, Reinhold Klapsing and Eckhart Koppen, University of Essen, Germany. Available in PostScript and PDF. 22 January 2001.
• RDF and RDF Schema Concepts Reference by Dave Beckett, ILRT, University of Bristol [Disclosure: editor of this guide]. 12 January 2001.
• Primer: Getting into RDF & Semantic Web using N3 - An introduction to the simplified teaching language Notation 3 (N3) by Tim Berners-Lee. See also the Python parser and converter from XML syntax. 11 January 2001.
• DAML+OIL Language of December 2000. A revision of the ontology language specification, examples and related documents. 11 January 2001.
• RDF Terminology and Concepts by Graham Klyne, Brian McBride, and Bill dehOra. 5 January 2001.
• An introduction to RDF - Exploring the standard for Web-based metadata, Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. on IBM developerWorks, December 2000.
• The future of natural-language processing article describing NLP used with RDF by Chimezie Thomas-Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. in UNIX insider, 29 December 2000.
• Introduction to RDF - PowerPoint presentation by Jonathan Borden Open Healthcare Group, given at XML DevCon, San Jose in November 2000 which introduces RDF, semantic networks, RDF schemas and gives examples using Healthcare schemas, RSS 1.0 and other advanced topics. 18 December 2000.
• A Proposed Interpretation of RDF Containers by Brian McBride, HP Labs and Dave Beckett, ILRT, University of Bristol. 13 December 2000.
• Supercharging WSDL with RDF - Managing structured Web service metadata , Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. on IBM developerWorks, November 2000.
• Java, RDF, and Wireless Computing, by Leon Shklar in Gamelan, developer.com, 28 November 2000.
• RDF-Schema for OIL - RDF Schema(s) for the Ontology Inference Layer (OIL) project. Latest update 10 November 2000.
• WSDL processing with XSLT, First steps for Web service description processing, Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. on IBM developerWorks, November 2000.
• Java, RDF, and the "Virtual Web" Part one: An introduction (01 September 1999), Part two (15 September 1999); Part three: Content aggregation (6 October 1999), by Leon Shklar in Gamelan, developer.com, September/October 1999.
• RIL: A Taste of Knowledge, Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. on XML.com, 11 October 2000.
• 4RDF: A Library for Web Metadata, Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. on XML.com, 11 October 2000.
• A Logical Interpretation of RDF - PS, PDF, HTML by Wolfram Conen and Reinhold Klapsing. See also the demo of the RDF Schema Explorer. (last updated) 11 October 2000.
• Extracting and reifying RDF from XML - Serializing RDF and edge labelled graphs in XML - proposal by Jonathan Borden (after discussion on the RDF-IG list), Open Healthcare Group, 21 September 2000.
• Harvesting RDF Statements from XLinks, W3C Note by Ron Daniel Jr. (ed.). 29 September 2000.
• Mapping namespace qualitied element names to URIs - proposal by Jonathan Borden, Open Healthcare Group, 17 September 2000.
• HyperRDF: Using XHTML Authoring Tools with XSLT to produce RDF Schemas, Dan Connolly - note on Dan's experiments with using XSLT to scrape web pages. 13 September 2000.
• A Layered Approach to Information Modeling and Interoperability on the Web - HTML, PDF by Sergey Melnik and Stefan Decker, Digital Libraries Project, Database Group, Stanford University, USA, in Proceedings ECDL'00 Workshop on the Semantic Web, Lisbon, Portugal, 4 September 2000.
• The Semantic Web: The Roles of XML and RDF by Stefan Decker, Sergey Melnik, Frank van Harmelen, Dieter Fensel, Michel Klein, Jeen Broekstra, Michael Erdmann and Ian Horrocks in IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 4(5), pp. 63-74, Sept/Oct 2000
• Processing an RDF Site Summary Format using Jena, Brian McBride, HP Labs, 2 September 2000
• Email Fields as RDF, Dan Connolly - a schema based on RFC 822 to describe email-like message formats
• Why is RDF Hard?, Michael Rose, Off the Desktop - provides a list of the reasons why RDF is hard for the outsider, 15 August 2000.
• RDF Standard Terms - attempt to re-state and define schemas of RDF and RDF Schema in a combined form, Dan Connolly, 13 August 2000.
• Accessibility Features of SVG by Charles McCathieNevile, Marja-Riitta Koivunen - including benefits of RDF/XML information in SVG, and a visualisation of the RDF graph. 7 August 2000
• RDF - FutureWeb? - quotes and frequently asked questions about RDF for laypersons by William Loughborough, August 2000.
• Metadata for Dummies (in Russian) by Non-Governmental Organizations Sector Support Program (NGOSS), Moscow, Russia. 14 July 2000.
• The Semantic Web - on the respective Roles of XML and RDF by Stefan Decker, Frank van Harmelen, Jeen Broekstra, Michael Erdmann, Dieter Fensel, Ian Horrocks, Michel Klein and Sergey Melnik, 7 July 2000. (From Oil Papers)
• Adding formal semantics to the Web: building on top of RDF Schema by Jeen Broekstra, Michael Klein, Stefan Decker and Ian Horrocks, 4 July 2000. (From Oil Papers)
• RDF Made Easy - HTML and PPT 95, John Cowan, 16 June 2000.
• Extensible use of RDF in a business context by Kerstin Forsberg and Lars Dannstedt in Proceedings of WWW9 Conference, Amsterdam, Netherlands, May 2000.
• Topic Maps and RDF: A First Cut, Steve Pepper. June 2000. "a first cut at understanding the similarities and differences between these two approaches to making information findable."
• An Extensible Approach for Modeling Ontologies in RDF(S) (PDF) by Steffen Staab, Michael Erdmann, Alexander Maedche and Stefan Decker, AIFB, Karlsruhe University, Germany, 12 April 2000.
• RDF Description Services - W3C RDF Interest Group discussion document by Dan Brickley, University of Bristol (presently at W3C), 23 November 1999.
• RDF Query Languages: A state-of-the-art (PDF), Greg Karvounarakis, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), Crete, Greece, 22 November 1999.
• Storing RDF in a relational database - request for comments for the W3C RDF Interest Group by Sergey Melnik, Digital Libraries Project, Database Group, Stanford University, USA, 14 November 1999.
• RDF: Un modelo de metadatos flexible para las bibliotecas digitales del próximo milenio (RDF: A flexible metadata model for digital libraries of the next millenium) by Eva Méndez Rodríguez, Dpto. de Biblioteconomía y Documentación, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. A paper and PPT presentation in Spanish giving a general introduction to RDF and how it "promises to be a flexible standard for information structure in Digital Libraries of the 21st century.", 5 November 1999.
• Pondering the possibilities of the 'semantic Web', Jim Rapoza, PC Week (now eWeek), 20 October 1999.
• Representing Process Specification Language (PSL) as RDF/XML, Josh Lubell, 1 September 1999.
• A proposal for an RDF API (Radix), Ron Daniel Jr., message to RDF-Dev list, 3 June 1999.
• Automatic RDF Metadata Generation for Resource Discovery, Charlotte Jenkins, Mike Jackson, Peter Burden and Jon Wallis, School of Computing & IT, University of Wolverhampton, UK, May 1999. Presented at WWW8, Toronto, Canada, May 1999.
• RDF - Using XML to describe Data, Ralph Swick, presentation at WWW8, Toronto, Canada, 12 May 1999
• Self-describing images - Embedding RDF Metadata in media objects - a case study using PNG, Dan Brickley, TASI project, 15 April 1999.
• RDF Sitemaps - RDF sitemaps using HTML link types and Dublin Core, Dan Brickley, 26 January 1999.
• Innovators of the Net: Ramanathan V. Guha and RDF - An interview with R.V. Guha which gives a background on the history of RDF from his previous work at Cyc, Apple (MCF, HotSauce) and Netscape (Aurora, Open Directory) and from discussions with Tim Bray (XML). 8 January 1999.
• Query + Metadata + Logic = Metalog, Massimo Marchiori and Janne Saarela, W3C, position paper for W3C QL'98 Query Languages Workshop, 5 December 1998.
• RDF Query Specification, Ashok Malhotra, Neel Sundaresan (IBM), position paper for W3C QL'98 Query Languages Workshop, 3 December 1998.
• A Query and Inference Service for RDF, Stefan Decker, Dan Brickley, Janne Saarela and Jürgen Angele, position paper for W3C QL'98 Query Languages Workshop, 18 November 1998.
• Enabling Inferencing, R.V. Guha, Ora Lassila, Eric Miller and Dan Brickley, position paper for W3C QL'98 Query Languages Workshop, 18 November 1998.
• An Idiot's Guide to the Resource Description Framework, Renato Iannella, DSTC Pty Ltd, The University of Queensland, Australia, 25 January 1999 (last updated), The New Review of Information Networking, Taylor Graham, Vol 4, 1998
• Das Resource Description Framework (RDF) - ein neuer Weg zur Verwaltung von Metadaten im Netz (Resource Description Framework (RDF) - a new way to administer Metadata on the Net) - html and PDF, auf dem 4th Workshop Multimediale Informations und Kommunikationssysteme 1998, Eckhardt Schön, Technische Universität Ilmenau, Germany, 8 October 1998.
• Web Metadata: A Matter of Semantics, Ora Lassila, IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 2, No. 4, July / August 1998
• Metadata for the Web - RDF and the Dublin Core, Andy Powell, UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN), University of Bath, UK at UKOLUG, Manchester Conference Centre, UK, July 1998 (See also presentation below)
• Getting Deep Into Metadata, Nate Zelnick, the XML Files, WebDeveloper.com, 12 June 1998.
• Why RDF, Note by Tim Bray, Textuality, 8 June 1998
• An Introduction to the Resource Description Framework (UK mirror), Eric Miller, OCLC, D-Lib Magazine, May 1998
• RDF - What's in it for us?, Janus Boye, irt.org, 16 May 1998.
• A formulation of the RDF data model : A set-theory model of 'layer 0' and 'layer 1', Ian Peacock, UKOLN, UK, 13 May 1998.
• Rule-based metadata crosswalks using RDF - A case study using classification scheme mapping, Dan Brickley, 16 April 1998.
• RDF Assertions over HTTP, Dan Brickley, April 1998.
• A Description of MMB Concepts in RDF and Metadata Model Conversion to RDF, position paper by William W. Song, SISU, Preben Hansen (SISU), Mats B. Andersson (IMT), and Rolf Wohed (SISU), April 1998
• Resource Description Framework (RDF), Damian Mac Randal, The Future of the Web (series of technical talks), W3C Office, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, April 1998.
• What is... RDF?, Rachel Heery, Ariadne Magazine, 5 March 1998
• RDF Metadata and Agent Architectures, Ora Lassila, Nokia & W3C, USA, 21 November 1997, at Workshop on Compositional Software Architectures, Monterey, California, 6-8 January 1998

Resource Description Framework Discussions

• Rdfws -- RDF in Web services mailing list. Topics include the use of RDF to augment systems such as UDDI/WSDL or ebXML to the proposal and development of original solutions. See also RDF Inference for more information. Announced and hosted by Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought, 19 May 2001.
• www-rdf-dspace mailing list for RDF and digital libraries - a forum for collaboration between digital library activities such as MIT's DSpace project and the Semantic Web. 15 May 2001.
• W3C RDF Logic List(www-rdf-logic) - public forum for technical discussion concerning the design of logic-based languages for use on the Web owned by Dan Brickley. The message archives are also available. September 2000.
• W3C RDF Interest Group (RDF-IG) - public forum for discussion of RDF model, syntax and applications owned by Ralph Swick and Dan Brickley. Also available are the message Archive and Issue Tracking pages.
• W3C RDF Documents comments archive
• Netscape Open Directory RDF Announcements list
• RDF-Dev Mailing List - a list for RDF developers owned by Dan Brickley, University of Bristol, UK. Superceded by RDF Interest Group list. Announced 21 June 1998.
• Private W3C-members-only working group

Resource Description Framework Press

• Patent claims about RDF. A company based in Vancouver called Unified Data Technologies, Ltd. claimed to have some patents on a technology that covered RDF and RSS. First reported by Patent threat to W3C's RDF technology (Edd Dumbill, O'Reilly) and RDF/RSS Patents (Dale Dougherty, O'Reilly). See also Doubt cast over Web standard's ownership (Margaret Kane, NEWS.com), the thread on the RDF Interest list including Don't succumb to FUD Re: Patent threat over RDF?. 2 January 2002
• MacWeek report on Job's Macworld Keynote - "Apple introduced solid products, and no RDF mojo was needed to sell them.". :-). 14 January 2001.
• Super Model by Leigh Dodds in XML-Deviant, XML.com - a review of RDF-IG discussions on splitting the model and syntax document and other discussions in early September. 20 September 2000.
• The Free-For-All in Montreal, Liora Alschuler, XML.com - report on the RDF & ISO/XML Topicmap meeting held in Montreal in August. See also Dan Connolly's agenda and notes and a transcript of an IRC meeting. 13-19 September 2000
• XML and the Resource Description Framework: The Great Web Hope, Norm Medeiros, ONLINE Magazine, Volume 24, Number 5, September 2000.
• Instant RDF? by Leigh Dodds in XML-Deviant, XML.com - report on RDF-IG syntax discussions, screen scraping experiements and usability problems of RDF. 30 August 2000.
• Putting RDF to Work, Edd Dumbill, 10 August 2000.
• XML-Deviant - Being Resourceful, Leigh Dodds - report on XML-Dev discussions of RDF in February 2000.
• W3C recommends Resource Description Framework, CNET News.com, 24 February 1999.
• W3C Issues Recommendation for Resource Description Framework (RDF) - Introduces model for defining and organizing information, W3C, 24 February 1999.
• W3C mulls XML spec, CNET News.com, 10 August 1998 -- report about the DCD Note by IBM and Microsoft, 31 July 1998 - "DCD relies on work accomplished in the RDF and XML working groups".
• RDF and Metadata, Tim Bray, XML.com, 9 June 1998 (also below at Textuality)
• New Specs Are in the Works for Web Data, Brian Hannon, PC Week (now eWeek), 29 May 1998
• 1st Annual Builder.com Web Innovator Awards (1997): R. V. Guha for Resource Description Framework (RDF), 15 April 1998
• Resource Description Framework spec is poised to provide better Web publishing with metadata, Eamonn Sullivan, PC Week (now eWeek), 31 October 1997
• W3C takes first step toward RDF spec, Alex Lash, CNET News.com, 3 October 1997
• W3C Publishes Public Draft of Resource Description Framework (RDF), 3 October 1997

Resource Description Framework Presentations and Events

• DAML and Quantum Topic Maps by Nikita Ogievetsky, Cogitech. A presentation made at Knowledge Technologies 2002, Seattle, WA, USA. March 13 2002
• Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web, presentation Eric Miller, W3C given at ECDL 2001, Darmstadt on the W3C Semantic Web Activity, development, standardisation work and how it relates to digital libraries. Note: contains embedded SVG diagrams. 6 September 2001.
• XML Topic Maps through RDF Glasses, Nikita Ogievetsky, Cogitech. A presentation made at Extreme Markup Languages 2001, Montréal, on looking at RDF as XTM, and XTM as RDF with a transformation tool, RDF schema for XTM, SquishQL used over XTM and a quick summary of RDF and XTM. 25 August 2001.
• International Semantic Web Working Symposium (SWWS), Stanford, California, USA held from 30 July 2001 - 1 August 2001. Contains program and proceedings and links to presented demos, BOF reports. Latest update 15 August 2001.
• Schemas and the Semantic Web, presentation by Thomas Baker, GMD at SCHEMAS Workshop, Budapest, 10 May 2001.
• Resource Description Framework class slides from John Punin, part of the Programming XML in Java class given at RPI, USA. 25 May 2001.
• Semantic Web Today by Dave Beckett, invited lecture in Electronic Commerce and New Media series, Department of Information Systems, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria. [Disclosure: given by the editor of this guide] 21 May 2001.
• Introduction to RDF (PowerPoint) given at XML DevCon by Jonathan Borden, Open Healthcare, April 2001.
• Understanding RDF, Dan Brickley, University of Bristol, created sometime in 1999, published 6 September 2000.
• XML and the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, at XML 2000. Contains an interesting diagram about where Tim thinks RDF fits in the the future. 6 September 2000.
• Distributed XML: the role played by XML in the next-generation Web, Edd Dumbill, at XML 2000, Boston, 6 September 2000.
• SOAP, RDF and the Semantic Web - slides (zip), slides (HTML and Walkthrough of RDF Examples by Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, Microsoft at WWW 9 Developer's Day Semantic Web Track, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 19 May 2000.
• Getting There From Here - Deploying RDF in a Large Scale Mirror Service, Dave Beckett, ILRT, University of Bristol, at WWW 9 Developer's Day Semantic Web Track, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 19 May 2000.
• RDF: A Frame System for the Web (PowerPoint), Ora Lassila (with Henry S. Thompson), presentation at the workshop on "Semantics for the Web" at Schloss Dagstuhl, Wadern, Germany, March 2000
• Databases, Naming, Indexing and Searching, Eric Miller and Stuart Weibel, WWW 8, Toronto, Canada, 14 May 1999.
• Metadata for Networked Resources Tutorial, Carl Lagoze, Eric Miller and Stuart Weibel, WWW 8, Toronto, Canada, 11 May 1999.
• RDF - Tools and Applications Tutorial, Neel Sundaresan, WWW 8, Toronto, Canada, 11 May 1999.
• DanZIG RDF presentation by Anders Ardø, Technical Knowledge Center & Library of Denmark, DTV, 24 April 1999.
• U.S. Government Information Locator Service (GILS), the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, the Warwick Framework, and Resource Description Framework, Susan Kaye Soy, University of Texas, 15 November 1998.
• Resource Description Framework: Overview and Update, Eric Miller, OCLC, Metastructures '98, Montreal, Canada, 18 August 1998.
• Metadata for the Web - RDF and the Dublin Core, Andy Powell, UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN), University of Bath, UK at UKOLUG, Manchester Conference Centre, UK, July 1998 (See also paper above)
• Using RDF to model multimedia content, Janne Saarela, W3C Workshop on Television and the Web, Sophia-Antipolis, France, June 1998
• Managing the web: Chaos to Quality, Tim Berners-Lee, AIIM, Anaheim, CA, USA, 12 May 1998. RDF is mentioned as a way of defining meaning, or common semantics on the web.
• UKOLN RDF Seminar, Bath, 8 May 1998 including presentations by Renato Iannella and Brian Kelly: "What is RDF?". Also by Brian, a very useful RDF Tools Briefing Sheet written for the Seminar.
• Technical Overview of the Resource Description Framework, Ralph Swick, W3C, WWW7, Brisbane, 18 April 1998
• RDF and Metadata in Mozilla, Eric Miller, OCLC, WWW7, Brisbane, 18 April 1998
• RDF: Resource Description Framework Josef Dietl and Ralph Swick, W3C, WWW7, Brisbane, 17 April 1998
• WWW7 Tutorial: Using Web Metadata, Various Authors, WWW7, Brisbane, 10 April 1998; Part 2: The Resource Description Framework, Eric Miller, OCLC.
• Keynote Talk by Tim Berners-Lee, WWW7 Brisbane. RDF is mentioned as part of his theme to provide evolvability and "partial understanding". 18 April 1998.
• XML & Next Generatiob Web publishing, Tim Berners-Lee, Seybold Conference, New York, NY, USA. Mentions RDF as a common metadata framework. 18 March 1998.
• Evolution of Web Data Formats, Dan Connolly, XML Conference, Seattle, WA, USA. Mentions when to use XML vs RDF. March 1998
• Metadata Repositories and Registries using RDF, Renato Iannella, DSTC Pty Ltd, The University of Queensland, Australia, at First European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Pisa, Italy, 1-3 September 1997.
• W3C Resource Description Framework, Eric Miller, OCLC, at 5th Dublin Core Meeting (DC5), Helsinki, Finland, 17 October 1997
• Metadata at W3C, Ralph Swick and Eric Miller, OCLC, July 1997

Netscape, Mozilla and RDF

Mozilla Open Source web browser

• mozCC by Nathan R. Yergler. An extension for mozilla-based browsers, including Mozilla Firebird, Mozilla and Netscape providing a way to examine Creative Commons licenses embedded in web pages. See the installation instructions and news for more information. License: MPL. Version 0.8.3 with important bug fixes correcting lockups on Mozilla and Firefox announced 27 July 2004.
• Rapid Application Development with Mozilla by Nigel McFarlane, Prentice Hall Professional Technical References, ISBN 0131423436. Includes an explanation of Mozilla's RDF implementation and tutorial material for RDF in mozilla (the author claims five chapters are relevant to RDF). Some bookshop links to it can be found from the ISBN.nu page for this book. Announced 2 January 2004.
• Mozquery by Daniel Fournier. A package for the Mozilla/Firebird platform providing ASRDF RDF graph terse notation grammar and an XML syntax converter for RDF coding using the outliner paradigm. License: Open Source. Announced 18 November 2003.
• JavaScript library support for RDF in Mozilla, part of the jslib project. 18 October 2002.
• RDF, RDF Tools, and the Content Model, chapter in Creating Applications with Mozilla book in development online being published by O'Reilly & Associates. 18 October 2002.
• Mozilla Project Resource Description Framework (RDF) page.

  Mozilla projects using RDF include Aurora and SmartBrowsing

• Mozilla RDF - Enabling Inference - an umbrella project for experimental work investigating the integration of logic/inference capabilities into Mozilla.
• Mozillation project - a project to wrap a prolog engine as a Mozilla XP-COM component to allow client-side inferences to be made from RDF statements.
• RDF in Fifty Words or Less
• Back End Architecture - How the RDF back-end works in mozilla.
• How it works with NGLayout - how RDF/XML works with the next generation layout engine.
• On Making A Content Model From A Graph - why it's hard to make a content model from a graph, and suggests some ways to deal with it (also, help wanted).
• A version of Mozilla was released as Netscape 6 PR1, 5 April 2000
• Press Release from Netscape announcing the intention to develop and use RDF inside products, 8 September 1997
• RDF sitemap of Mozilla.org (proto-RDF)
• Mozilla have an RDF project mailing list, which you can subscribe to; details on the mozilla.org community page.

  The list is also available as the newsgroup netscape.public.mozilla.rdf on the Mozilla news server. Alternatively browse via Google groups: netscape.public.mozilla.rdf

• HotWired's WebMonkey article on Mozilla, Paul Boutin, 7 May 1998 which refers to HotWired's own RDF Sitemap (proto-RDF).
• Mozilla - Mail and News - prototype "smart mail" for Mozilla, using RDF, JavaScript and HTML, 5 August 1998.

Open Directory (dmoz) project

• Scripts to clean dmoz RDF output by Sergey Melnik, Digital Libraries Project, Database Group, Stanford University, USA, 20 March 2000.
• An RDF dump of the database is provided regularly.

RDF Editors and Tools

• Metadesk RDF authoring tool from ISI, USA. An authoring tool emphasising entry of facts, rather than construction of ontologies. MS Windows only binary (Java jars and DLLs). License: unknown. 26 February 2005.
• NG4J - Named Graphs API for Jena by Chris Bizer. An extension to the Java Jena Semantic Web framework for parsing, manipulating and serializing sets of Named Graph. Includes APIs for named graph operations, readers, writers and parsers and serializers for the TriG and TriX formats. See also the Named Graph Paper (PDF) and the sourceforge project for downloads. License: BSD. Version 0.4 announced 24 February 2005.
• pOWL Semantic Web Development Platform by Sören Auer. A PHP toolkit for the semantic web consisting of the RAP RDF API, RDFS and OWL support from pOWL including editing and querying with RDQL and full-text, multiple languages, versioning support, plug-ins and a web application framework. License: GPL. Version 0.8 released 13 December 2004.
• SMART: System for Managing Applications based on RDF Technology by Andrey Guskov and Vladimir Shraibman. An application to aid the creation of documents described with RDF, implemented as Java servlets using Jena and GraphViz (optionally). License: unknown. Version 1.5.2 released 12 November 2004.
• Ontaria by Sandro Hawke. A web-based browser for ontologies and other RDF data. First announced 23 September 2004.
• VIVID (Visual Variable-depth Information Display) browser for OWL and RDF using densely-packed presentations by Baoshi Yan, ISI, USA. License: unknown. Version 1.01 announced 20 August 2004.
• RAP - RDF API for PHP by Chris Bizer. A pure PHP package for manipulating RDF models, querying them with RDQL, parsing/serializing the RDF/XML, N3 and N-Triples syntaxes and providing a network server for NetAPI. See also the online demo. License: GPL. Version 0.8.1 with speed improvements, improved indexing and searching, new unit test suite and other bug fixes announced 24 August 2004.
• RDFStore Perl/C RDF API and Storage by Alberto Reggiori. A system for managing RDF model databases, storing them in databases, natively, free-text searching and indexing, parsing and serialising, querying with RDQL. See also the demos, native store description and downloads area. Version 0.50 with major rewrite into mostly C, new native store and indexing model announced 19 August 2004.
• DR2Q by Chris Bizer. A Java plug-in for the Jena toolkit to provide a declarative mapping language for treating non-RDF databases as virtual RDF graphs. See also the user manual and language specification and sourceforge download area andbenchmark results. GPL License. Version 0.2 with significant language extensions, better performance, logging, test suite and bug fixes announced 12 August 2004
• ARC PHP RDF/XML parser by Benjamin Nowack. A PHP parser for RDF/XML and PHP serializer for N-Triples optimized for size and ease of use (single files) rather than for functionality - some parts of RDF/XML are not yet supported. First announcement 22 July 2004.
• Veudas Web RDF Editor by Phil Dawes. A Javascript RDF editor on the client side connected to a simple python server with rdflib working with Mozilla 1.4 and IE6. See also the demonstration. Version 0.5 a complete rewrite in python cgi and javascript, merged rdf store view and editing support for simple OWL in announced 16 July 2004.
• Creative Commons RDF (ccRdf) by Nathan R. Yergler. A python module for manipulating CC - parsing RDF, extracting licensing information and emitting RDF. See the download area. License: GNU GPL2. Version 0.4.5 with RDFlib 2.0.3 support, unit tests and RDF extraction module announced 24 June 2004.
• 3store persistent RDF knowledgebase by Steve Harris, AKT Consortium, University of Southampton. An efficient RDF KB written in C with RDQL support, subclass and subproperty taxonomic reasoning supporting most RDF/S entailments, query complexity estimation, RDF import, fast query execution and has scaled to over 25M triples. Uses MySQL 3.23 for storage and provides Apache module and perl interfaces. See also the 3store RDQL query demo and download area. GPL License. Version 2.2.17 with endianess bug fix (database reload needed), 3x assert speed improvements, SQL table naming, OSX build fixes and other bug fixes announced 21 June 2004.
• Plugin for Protégé for OWL (Web Ontology Language) by Holger Knublauch, Stanford Medical Informatics. It provides loading, saving, editing, visualzing of OWL ontologies along with interfaces to DL reasoners (for OWL DL) such as Racer and other services via Jena. This is also available with the Protégé 2.0 release, from the Protégé download site. License: MPL 1.1. Version 1.1 with many improvments and features as well as a new tutorial on OWL and Protege announced 12 June 2004
• Rx4RDF and Rhizome by Adam Souzis. A python application for building RDF systems handling querying, transforming (RxSLT) and updating RDF via a mapping of the RDF model to the XML data model defined by XPath (RxPath). Rhizome builds on Rx4RDF to make a content management and delivery system and includes the Racoon simple application server and RhizML wiki-like text formatting language and RxML alternate XML syntax for RDF. Requires the Python 4Suite as a store, also can use Redland. GPL License. 0.3.0 with new documetnation manuals, Rhizome enhancements, better security and authentication for Raccoon and many other enhancements (full changelog) announced 14 May 2004.
• Joseki RDF server by Andy Seaborne, HP Labs, Bristol. A Java application part of the Jena RDF framework which provides a server for publishing, updating and querying RDF models on the web using HTTP and RDQL. See the quick guide, RDF WebAPI protocol using HTTP, download, SourceForge project and CVS. BSD-style license. Version 2.1 with perl client library, using jakarta common logging, other updates and fixes announced 7 May 2004.
• RDQLPlus by Chris Wilper, CornellUniversity. A Java application providing a visualisation of RDF databases along with zoomable RDQL query results using the Jena toolkit with stores in Jena, a native Java database or RDF files. Defines and provides the RDF Insertion Deletion Inspection and Query Language (RIDIQL) to allow database access and updating across the stores. Uses the AT&T GraphViz toolkit to perform the graph drawing. See also the mailing list. License: Mozilla Public License 1.1. First announced 24 February 2004.
• SW Inferencing Skeleton in Haskell (SWISH) by Graham Klyne. Tools for semantic web inferencing using the Haskell pure functional programming language. The framework includes datatyping and functions for RDF extended to N3 formulae like CWM, interface for the graphs, a Notation3 parser and formatter, support for RDF dataypes and datatype-specific properties. License: GNU GPL2. Version 0.2.1 with a graph difference highlighter announced 11 February 2004.
• Cwm general purpose data processor for the Semantic Web by Tim Berners-Lee. A general-purpose semantic web data processor in Python including support for RDF, DAML+OIL and OWL, querying, checking transforming and filtering. Provdes a forward chaining reasoner and handlers the RDF/XML and RDF/N3 (which was invented for cwm) serializations. See also the CWM tutorial using N3, announcement and discussion lists. License: W3C software license. 0.7 release announced 10 February 2004.
• Jena2 Semantic Web Toolkit, Semantic Web Group, HP Labs, Bristol, UK. Version 2.1 of the Jena Java RDF system with APIs for RDF, OWL, RDFS and DAML. Features include parsers and writies for RDF/XML, N3, N-Triples, reasoners for RDQL, OWL (OWL lite subset), persistent storage in relational databases (no Sleepycat/BerkeleyDB support at present) and an OWL syntax checker. See also the jena discussion list. License: Open source BSD-like. Version 2.1 with extended and improved OWL syntax checker, logging API change announced 10 February 2004.
• Redland RDF Application Framework by Dave Beckett, Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol - a C library providing a high-level RDF interface allowing the RDF graph to be parsed from XML, stored, queried and manipulated. Redland implements each of the RDF concepts in its own class via an object based API, reflected into the other language APIs - Perl, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby and Tcl. See also the release notes. [Disclosure: authored by the editor of this guide]. License: LGPL/GPL/MPL. Version 0.9.15 with new MySQL, AKT TripleStore, File URI storage, UTF-8 improvements, Raptor 1.2.0 support with Turtle announced 31 January 2004
• Raptor RDF Parser Toolkit - a C library of RDF parsers - RDF/XML and N-Triples designed for integration with Redland but separate by Dave Beckett, Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol. [Disclosure: authored by the editor of this guide]. GPL/MPL license. Version 1.2.0 with new Turtle Terse RDF Triple Language parser, libfetch support and other minor updates announced 24 January 2004.
• Meta-Model Management based on RDFs Revision Reflection (MR3) by Naoki Sugiura and others, Shizuoka University, Japan. A graphical editor in Java for RDF data, schema information such as classes and properties along with management of RDF and RDFS sources providing interactive editing of relationships. Includes Japanese and English language support. License: GPL or LGPL (using alternate Java libraries). Beta release 1 announced 4 December 2003.
• Pyrple Python RDF API by Sean B. Palmer. Provides a graph API with query/bindings, parsing for RDF/XML, N3 and N-Triples, several support utilities. First announcement 1 December 2003.
• easy RDF Query Language (eRQL) by Fabian Wleklinski and Karsten Tolle, ICS Databases and Information Systems, Frankfurt / ICS FORTH. A query langauge for RDF based upon ICS-FORTH's RQL and an implementation eRqlEngine written in Java based on ICS-FORTH VRP. See also eRQL documentation. License: unspecified open source. First announced 27 November 2003.
• RDF-Source related Storage System (RDF-S3) by Karsten Tolle, ICS Databases and Information Systems, Frankfurt / ICS FORTH. A Java schema-specific storage system with special support for preserving RDF statement sources in the store. Uses VRP for validation, supports any JDBC-compliant RDBMS, automatic inclusion of missing types, a GUI interface and storing of user preferences. License: freeware. Version 1.1 beta announced 18 November 2003.
• BPEL2DAML-S by Jun Shen, Swinburne University of Technology. A Java tool for generatating ontologies based on DAML-S from specific BPEL4WS workflow specifications. License: unspecified, open source assumed. Version 1.0 announced 30 October 2003.
• Kowari Metadata Store by Plugged In Software. A Java application consisting of a triple store with iTQL query language, datatype support, descriptors and model views, Lucerne full text searching. Many further improvements planned. Mozilla Public License V1.1. First early release version announced 26 October 2003.
• RDFStyles by Reto Bachmann-Gmuer, a tool in Java for rendering RDG graphs to text based formats such as HTML or XML, intended as an alternative to using XSLT. download from the KnoBot project. See also the rdf schema and demo. Apache Software License Version 1.1 with advertising. Announced 20 October 2003.
• WonderWeb OWL API in Java by Sean Bechhofer, University of Manchester and Raphael Volz, University of Karlsruhe. This consists of Java interfaces at the OWL abstract syntax level and includes a simple OWL Species Validator. It is targeted at OWL DL and OWL Lite. SourceForge project and download area. GLPL License. Announced 15 October 2003.
• Drive RDF API for C# by Rahul Singh, CMU. Drive works with any .NET language, is available as a COM server and has MSDN-style documentation. It provides RDf/XML and N-Triples parsers, graph merging, and Collection class support. See also Distributed as .NET assembly binaries as well as source. GNU LGPL License. Version 3.3 with a new Drive RDF Toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer and minor bug fixes announced 5 October 2003.
• DR2 MAP Java application to export RDF from relational databases by Chris Bizer. Uses any RDBMS offering JDBC or ODBC access (tested with Microsoft Access and MySQL) and allows the user to describe the mapping in an XML-based mapping language. See also the download area on sourceforge and language specification (PDF). LGPL License. V0.2 updated to use Jena2 and Joseki announced 29 September 2003
• TreeHugger - XSLT for RDF by Damian Steer. A Java extension to the Saxon XSLT engine to allow XSLT to work over an RDF model in Jena. See also the online demo. BSD License. Announced 10 September 2003.
• Rio Java RDF I/O package by Arjohn Kampman, Aduna. A small (66kB) Java package for parsing and writing syntaxes for RDF - RDF/XML, N-Triples and Notation3. Requires only a SAX2 XML parser. Passes all the positive RDF Core WG tests cases, fails only one negative one (Unicode NFC check). First version 0.96 announced 22 August 2003.
• ROSCO non-judgemental RDF schema and document checker by Libby Miller, ILRT, University of Bristol, UK. Checks that the classes and properties used are consistent in the schema, that it is intenrally consistent and the RDF document using the schema is consistent with best practice. 14 August 2003
• SWI-Prolog RDF parser by Jan Wielemaker now part of SWI-Prolog. See the parser documentation, the evolving SWI-Prolog/XPCE semantic web library and get from the download area. LGPL (kernel)/GPL (libraries) licenses. 18 August 2003.
• McCullough Knowledge Explorer, an application of a general-purpose knowledge representation language (MKR). MKE can read simple RDF and OWL and can use the TAP Knowledge Base but implements different semantics from the RDF or OWL formal semantics that are more powerful and more user-friendly than the OWL language. See also MKE Applications. GPL License. Added 18 August 2003
• IsaViz Visual Authoring Tool for RDF by Emmanuel Pietriga (Xerox Research Europe/W3C), for the W3C Semantic Web Advanced Development (SWAD) project. A Java tool based using several existing RDF and visualising systems that allows authoring of RDF graphs by drawing them and importing and exporting of RDF/XML, N3 and N-Triples. Version 2.0 with GSS Graph Style Sheet, SVG support and updated for Jena2 beta1 handling RDF Core last call working drafts, datatypes (full changelist) announced 11 August 2003.
• InferEd RDF editor with inference by Intellidimension - an authoring and browsing environment for RDF on MS Windows NT/2000/XP allowing manipulation of RDF data, browsing, editing with rule-based inference. Provides RDF/XML, N-Triples and N3 syntax support, URIQA client, reification, XMP support and more. Includes integration with RDF Gateway. Commercial application. Beta2 announced 7 August 2003.
• rdfxml.py - An RDF/XML Parser in Python by Sean B. Palmer. A pure python parser for a subset of RDF/XML using the SAX interface. GPL/W3C licensed. 11 July 2003.
• Spectacle:Server by Jos van der Meer, Aidministrator. A Java web component for Tomcat/JBoss/etc. providing exploration over structured or semi-structured data such as RDF via via Sesame See also the demonstration. Commercial license (first 25,000 page views free). First version released 17 June 2003.
• MnM web page semantic annotation tool by Mattia Lanzoni, KMI, Open University, UK. Integrates a web browser and ontology editor with links to ontology servers and other tools. Provides support for RDF, DAML+OIL and OCML. This version includes the Amilcare information extraction tool by Fabio Ciravegna that can only be used with MnM. License: free of charge for non commercial use (except for Amilcare). 15 May 2003.
• Java RDF Crawler by Matt Biddulph. A Java crawler for RDF webs based on Jena that spiders the semantic web and stores it. Provides multithreaded downloading and tracks provenance of information. 21 April 2003.
• DAML+OIL plugin for Protégé by Grit Denker, SRI. Requires Protégé 1.8 build 1040 or later - see Protégé download site. 31 March 2003
• Delphi/Kylix Open RDF kit by Dieter Köhler. A collection of open source RDF components for manipulating RDF graphs, parsing N-Triples and RDF-aware controls for displaying the triples. GPL 2 and MPL 1.1 Licenses. 27 March 2003
• Fenfire Loom - a focus+context RDF graph browser in Java by Benja Fallenstein, part of the Fenfire project on a hyperstructured UI. See also the fenfire-rdf-discuss list. LGPL License. 0.1 announced 22 March 2003
• Euler Sharp by James Michael DuPont. A C# version of the Euler proof mechanism by Jos De Roo, AGFA for the .NET virtual machine. download area. Apache style license. 8 February 2003
• ICS-FORTH Validating RDF Parser (VRP) - an RDF parser in Java by Alexaki Sophia and Karsten Tolle, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), Crete, Greece and University of Frankfurt, Germany. VRP offers validation of RDF statements against an RDF Schema along with XML Schema Datatypes support and handles the 2003-01-23 RDF/XML syntax draft. It also provides schema statistics reporting and SVG output of the class and property hierarchies. V2.5 announced 4 February 2003.
• Ideagraph by Danny Ayers. A visual tool for creating maps of personal knowledge using RDF written in Java. See also the Ideagraph mailing list. Free for non-commercial use. Version 0.5 announced 15 December 2002.
• RDF Model Browser by Dima Skvortsov. A Java Servlets 2.2 web application for browsing RDF data using a tree view of the resources and properties rendered as HTML for the browser. GPL License. 25 November 2002.
• ConvertToRDF by Michael Grove, MINDSWAP group, University of Maryland, College Park, USA. A Java application to turn plain-text files into RDF, such as .csv files, database dumps using a mapping file (that can be in RDF or DAML). BSD style license. Announced 7 November 2002.
• RDF Instance Creator (RIC) by Michael Grove, MINDSWAP group, University of Maryland, College Park, USA. A Java application for creating semantic mark-up in OWL, DAML and RDF from mark up such as web pages and checking against ontologies, allowing ontologies to be extended. BSD style license. v3.0a announced 7 November 2002.
• DamlJessKB - DAML Error Checking/Simple Querying Service by Joe Kopena. A program using the the Stanford RDF API and Java Expert System Shell (Jess) to provide DAML processing, validating and querying. 7 November 2002.
• BrownSauce RDF browser by Damian Steer, HP Labs. A Java server-side (servlet) application for browsing generic RDF data using a web interface (HTML and CSS). BSD style license. Announced 6 November 2002.
• Python RDFLib by Dan Krech. A python RDF library providing an API to manipulate the RDF graph, parse and serializing RDF/XML along with persistent triple storage. BSD style license. See also the 1.0 stable release. Version 1.1.0 (development version) with RDF/XML updates, BTree backend, datatypes, updated interfaces announced 6 November 2002.
• Jena Java Semantic Web Toolkit, Semantic Web Group, HP Labs, Bristol. A Java system for manipulating RDF graphs including statement and resource-centric methods, cascading calls, container support, RDF/XML and N3 parser / writers, RDQL query language, inference support, persistent storage (SleepyCat DB, JDBC, many SQL databases). Open source BSD-like license. See also jena discussion list. Version 1.6.0 announced 15 October 2002.
• Semantic Markup, Ontology and RDF Editor (SMORE) by Aditya Kalyanpur, MINDSWAP group, University of Maryland, College Park, USA. A Java desktop tool for marking up web pages or text in RDF using web ontologies in association with user-defined terms. The tool includes an HTML editor and previewer, an ontology browser and a semantic data tree viewer. GPL License. Version 2.0b announced 10 October 2002.
• KArlsruhe ONtology and Semantic Web infrastructure (KAON) Java semantic web infrastructure targeted for business applications. Includes tools for ontology creation, mangement and application building with support and use of existing relational databases. See also the online demos, documentation, papers and sourceforge project area. LGPL license. 26 September 2002.
• ParkaSW semantic web database, MINDSWAP group, University of Maryland, College Park, USA. A scalable database in C for storage and retrieval of RDF graphs including inheritance support that can handle RDFS or OWL-lite levels (in progress). Currently can handle about 2.5M triples. MIT License. First release announced 20 September 2002.
• Tucana KnowledgeStore (TKS) by Plugged In Software, Brisbane, Australia - a Java scalable, distributed, transaction-safe, directed-graph database optimized for the management of metadata. Can handle RDF statements from 40M triples (32 bit) to 95M (64 bit), under active development and scales ot terabytes of RDF. Commercial software. Academic Release v1.0 announced 19 September 2002.
• Inkling RDF query using SquishQL by Libby Miller, ILRT, University of Bristol, UK. An implementation in Java of the SquishQL RDF query language that uses the JDBC API over SQL databases or an in-memory store. Updated with code improvements by Leigh Dodds, nwo using ARP parser and with testcases, use cases and a better query parser with help from Andy Seaborne. GPL license. Version 0.7 announced 2 August 2002.
• RDF Editor (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) by Orr Bernstein, Mohit Oberoi and John Punin. A aimple Java (Swing) RDF editor application that can create RDF/XML or N-Triples. Version 1.0 announced 24 July 2002.
• TAP Software Kit by R.V. Guha and Rob McCool, TAP Project. Includes both the client libraries in Perl and Java as well as the TAPache server for using and providing the GetData Interface that TAP defined. Version 0.75 announced 18 April 2003.
• FOAFBot: IRC Community Support Agent by Edd Dumbill. FOAFBot is an IRC bot that provides access to a knowledge base created by spidering FOAF files and can be queried on the channel for basic information about the members of a community.Handles asking who said what and signing of GPG keys. GPL license. Version 0.4 released 2 August 2002
• FOAF-a-matic by Leigh Dodds. A client JavaScript application for creating FOAF ("Friend-of-A-Friend") descriptions in RDF. Contains information on how to link yourself into the FOAF and RDFWeb. 11 June 2002
• RDQL query language for PHP by Garland Foster. A generic RDQL engine that can be used from PHP to query RDF from different sources including files, the web and (soon) MySQL databases. 8 July 2002.
• EEP3 Python Semantic Web API from Sean B. Palmer. A general API in python that includes a query system, storage, triples parsing, a simple CWMclone reasoner, N3 pre-processor, IRC bot that takes RDF, Notation3 parser and rdfdiff program. 3 July 2002.
• RDF Web Scraper from Aditya Kalyanpur, University of Maryland which allows mapping web pages into RDF markup. See the demo and Zip Download. 3 April 2002.
• Versa RDF query language by Mike Olson and Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought. A graph-based query language for RDF that allows traversal of arcs, processing of node contents, and general expression evaluation. See the versa draft specification, tutorial, discussions on the Versa / RDF Inference Language (RIL) list and the implementation in 4suite. 12 June 2002.
• TRIPLE RDF-based logic programming language by Stefan Decker and Michael Sintek. A general RDF query, inference, and transformation system that allows semantic web languages such as RDFS, DAML+OIL, UML, Topic Maps to be defined, used directly or via external classifiers. Handles inputing and outputing various syntaxes. See also presentation. Implemented in Java using XSB with apache-like open source license. 4 March 2002
• Wilbur RDF Toolkit for RDF and DAML (and XML) in Common Lisp by the Agent Technology group, Nokia Research Center. Nokia open source license. 19 February 2002.
• Profium SIR extractor demonstration: automated metadata extraction. Can extract RDF from various file formats including Adobe XMP documents, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint. 30 January 2002.
• OntoEdit 2.0 ontology editor by ontoprise. A development environment for knowledge models which handles concept and relation management, RDF import/export, fully supports many DAML+OIL constructs, supports multiple labels, an open plug-in capability including ones for integration with OntoBroker, OntoKick and domain lexicons. 12 December 2001.
• RDFAuthor: a graphical RDF instance data authoring tool for Mac OSX by Damian Steer. Intended to make it simple to produce RDF data without extensive experience of RDF and capable of exporting the data as SVG. Written in Java using Jena. 11 December 2001.
• RDFStore RDQL Demonstration by Alberto Reggiori. See also the Perl RDFStore system and the RDQL RDF query language. 19 October 2001.
• SWIPT: An RDF Parser/Tool in Python by Sean B. Palmer. A tool using other Python programs to allow reading/writing of various syntaxes that make RDF graphs. 9 October 2001.
• Blindfold Semantic Web Toolkit V0.1.1 by Sandro Hawke - A toolkit containing a grammar system that can read and write almost any format or language as if it were RDF/XML and an implementation of RDF graph comparison. 4 October 2001.
• RDF Data Query Language (RDQL), by Andy Seaborne, HP Labs. SQL-like RDF query language using the Jena RDF Java system. Open source license. 17 September 2001.
• FRODO RDFSViz from Michael Sintek, FRODO team at DFKI, Germany - a visualization service for RDF Schemas showing the class, sub-class and property relationships. 21 August 2001.
• DAML Validator by Dave Rager which checks DAML markup for syntax and semantic errors using the referenced schemas. 17 August 2001.
• Redfoot framework for for building distributed data-driven web applications with RDF and Python by James Tauber and Dan Krech. Provides an RDF database, query API, template language, module architecture, editor all with web interface, beginnings of P2P support, sample applications. BSD-style License. Version 1.0 announced. 6 September 2001.
• W3C RDF Validation Service by Art Barstow, W3C/HP - a service to parse RDF/XML content, create images of the RDF graphs, show the results as triples. Based on the ARP: Another RDF Parser. 13 August 2001.
• HyperDAML DAML or RDF/XML schemas to HTML viewer by Mike Dean with web form, CGI or downloadable versions. 31 July 2001.
• ARP: Another RDF Parser by Jeremy Carroll, HP Labs - a Java RDF/XML parser deisigned to integrate with Jena (and will be part of Jena in next release) strongly based on the relevant standards. Announced 27 July 2001.
• An Euler proof mechanism / RDF logic demonstrator, by Jos De Roo, AGFA. A java system that will generate a proof for a question about a given set of facts and rules which are acquired from the Web. The demo, and open source code is available for download. Latest version 13 August 2001.
• Ontomat DAML annotation tool by Siegfried Handschuh. 19 July 2001.
• Extensible Open RDF Toolkit (EOR) by OCLC Office of Research and The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative - a web based RDF metadata management and search system in Java (Open Source license). Announced by Harry Wagner, OCLC. 18 May 2001.
• Fydra - Decentralised and reliable resource discovery using RDF metadata by Johan Nagels, CoWorks - a Java servlet that can crawl the web and stores the resulting file metadata as RDF as well as discover indexers on the fly. 16 May 2001.
• RDFedt - RDF Editor for Windows by Jan Winkler. A freeware editor for RDF/XML graphs managing namespaces, schemas, terms in schemas. [Editors Note: works OK under WINE too]. Web site contains extra element sets for DAMML, XBL and XUL. 13 March 2001.
• XSB tabled logic programming and deductive database system for Unix and Windows version 2.3 now comes with an libwww-based RDF parser for adding RDF statements. 23 February 2001.
• Representing vCard Objects in RDF/XML, Renato Iannella, IPR Systems, W3C Note 22 February 2001
• RDF-Crawler Java-based tool/API which downloads interconnected fragments of RDF from the Internet and builds a knowledge base from them by Siegfried Handschuh (University of Karlsruhe, Germany) and Kalvis Apsitis (DATI Software Group, Latvia while visiting Karlsruhe). Uses SiRPAC (W3C or Stanford version), GNU Java regex, Xerces/XML4J (all included). License unknown. 9 February 2001.
• RDF Representation of Wordnet on SemanticWeb.org by Stefan Decker and Sergey Melnik. 2 February 2001.
• Protégé-2000 knowledge-based systems development environment that can be used to edit RDF and RDF Schema (and other languages) by the Protégé Team, Knowledge Modelling Group, Stanford. See also Protégé-related papers and for a comparison between the RDF semantic model and the Protégé semantic model see Using Protégé-2000 to Edit RDF. Version 1.5 of Profégé-2000 released on 31 January 2001.
• Uniform Web Index Maker Program (UWIMP) by Sean B. Palmer - a simple tool for RDF inclusion in XHTML files. 12 December 2000.
• OilEd Ontology Editor developed by the Information Management Group, University of Manchester. An editor written in Java which allows the building of simple ontologies, use of the FaCT reasoner and exporting of ontologies to formats including OIL-RDF and DAML-RDF. (Soon to be) GPL Licensed. See also the OIL Project. 12 April 2002.
• InterDataWorking Converter - a testbed for the concept of gateways that facilitate data exchange between heterogeneous applications. Deals with RDF/XML, UML, DAML, RDF Schema. Announced by Sergey Melnik, 28 November 2000.
• XSLT RDF Extractor for XHTML Files by Sean B. Palmer - an XHTML to RDF converter (using XSLT) that extracts semantic RDF data from XHTML pages. 27 November 2000.
• Annotea - a W3C project "enhancing the W3C collaboration environment with shared annotations using W3C standards" which uses an RDF annotatation schema to store the annotations on the server and Amaya as the client. 15 November 2000.
• Repat RDF Parser written in C by Jason Diamond, based on the Java RDF Filter by Dave Megginson. Repat uses expat, works on unix and Win32 and is open source. Most recent update, 10 November 2000.
• 4Suite Server by Fourthought Inc.. A platform for handling XML processing that provides XML services including RDF-based indexing and query. It is written in Python and available as Open Source
• RDF Schema Explorer online demonstration by Wolfram Conen/Xonar and Reinhold Klapsing, University of Essen, Germany based on the SWI-Prolog RDF parser by Jan Wielemaker.
• An XSLT-based RDF extractor for XML by Jonathan Borden, Open Healthcare Group, based on his experiments with new simpler syntaxes for RDF. Download the XSL Template. 21 September 2000.
• XSLT RDF Parser by Jason Diamond. Includes support for containers, rdf:value and rdf:parseType. See also the XSL template. 13 September 2000.
• RDF Parsers (Perl and Java) by Profium. Parsers in the style of the Stanford Java API for RDF (Sergey Melnik). See also the JavaDoc documentation and Online demonstration. Software license is unknown - cannot be read without registering. 29 May 2001.
• SVG Linearizer tools - A Java SVG-to-text converter, using RDF statements to help with the inherent graphical semantics by Guillaume Lovet, 2000 summer W3C Intern, 25 September 2000.
• XSet -> RDF Schema via XSLT, EBNF Groves, Bonsai and more... by Jonathan Borden, Open Healthcare Group. A description of XSet and XSLT goodies that transform it into RDF Schema and other formats.
• RDFDB: An RDF Database by R.V. Guha. An implementaiton of a full RDF system including parsing of XML syntax, storage, model, query language and a server interface. First release 25 July 2000.
• Dublin Core Extraction Service, Dan Connolly - a web service that takes an XSLT transformation and some XML data to produce RDF. June 2000.
• Transforming RDF with XSLT, Dan Connolly - some tools and examples of using an XSL to scrape RDF from arious web pages for use in parsers. See also the original announcement and an earlier related message. 2 May 2000.
• RDF Filter 1.0 alpha by Dave Megginson, A streaming, Java- and SAX2-based filter and handler interface for RDF processing. 27 March 2000.
• Rudolf: RDFViz - Exploring tools for RDF Graph Visualisation, Dan Brickley. A demo web interface to RDF visualisation generating bitmap images, VRML and SVG using the AT&T GraphViz toolkit. 24 March 2000.
• The Schematron - An XML Structure Validation Language using Patterns in Trees including an automatic external markup tool, Schematron-RDF, which creates RDF statements for detected patterns in a schema, Rick Jelliffe, Academia Sinica Computing Centre, Taiwan R.O.C, 31 December 1999.
• Three tools from the XWMF - An eXtensible Web Modeling Framework project by Alexander Block and Reinhold Klapsing, University of Essen, Germany (see applications), 28 December 1999.
  • rdf_parser - An RDF parser written in XOTcl (GPL license) and online demonstration
  • GraMToR (Deutsch) - A graphical editor for interactive construction of RDF data models, written in Tcl (GPL license).
  (may require use of non Open Source license code for the TclXML library)
• Metalog RDF querying system including a snapshot of the development materials.
• Streaming-based version of SiRPAC RDF Parser in Java, by Sergey Melnik, Digital Libraries Project, Database Group, Stanford University, USA. Also includes directions how to parse the Netscape Open Directory RDF dumps. 8 November 1999.
• DATAX: Data Exchange in XML by Dave Megginson, a Java library for "exchanging structured data records in XML written in any RDF-compliant format". August 1999.
• RDF parser / serializer / validator from the Generic Interoperability Framework (GINF) project by Sergey Melnik, Digital Libraries Project, Database Group, Stanford University, USA. First announcement 23 June 1999. (Uses SiRPAC and AElfred XML parser)
• SiLRI - the Simple Logic-based RDF Interpreter. A simple deductive database, written by Stefan Decker and Jürgen Angele (University of Karlsruhe) and implemented in Java. SiLRI is able to reason with metadata in the XML serialization of RDF using the old W3C SiRPAC (now offline) and was developed in the context of the Ontobroker Project. Latest release V1.1.1, 9 May 1999.
• The Reggie Metadata Editor by the Resource Discovery Unit of DSTC can handle a number of metadata schemes including DC, GILS, EDNA and AGLS and output them in HTMLs and RDF formats.
• DC-Dot is a Dublin Core editing tool which can output in RDF format as well as HTMLs.
• PrismEd by Andrew Waugh was presented at WWW7, Brisbane and is a generic metadata editor. (Does not seem to be available at web site as of early 1999).
• IBM's alphaWorks RDF for XML (no persistent URL - uses embedded session IDs and old ones give error messages!), Neel Sundaresan, IBM Almaden Research Center, 13 November 1998. As of year 2000, the area says "This technology has Retired".
• Java Serialization Using RDF with Schemas, software which translates the Java class and package APIS into RDF Schemas (applets require HotJava browser) now offline but might reappear at ontologos, Robert E. Kent, 12 June 1998.
  For those who don't have HotJava, I have saved a serialized version of Java's java.lang.Integer class in RDF Schema form

Resource Description Framework Applications and Projects

• Swoogle crawler-based indexing and retrieval service for the semantic web from Tim Finin, UMBC, USA. 15 September 2004.
• RDF Gateway by Intellidimension - a semantic web platform for MS Windows XP/NT/2000 allowing managing of data as RDF including an application server, web server and deductive RDF database. The main features are an SQL-style RDF query language, inference engine, datatypes, full text search, application development environment with ASP-like server pages, integration of many external data sources, web and non-web interfaces. Commercial application with 60-day evaluation version. Version 2.1 with many changes announced 15 September 2004.
• Progos 'thingy' semantic computing core by Progos in Java providing "a semantic bag for any data in which you can manipulate your semantic structured space" in 20K by mapping RDF into Java objects. See also what is thingy?, API docs, component docs and the download. License: GPL. Announced 20 May 2004.
• Fabl Programming Language by Chris Goad, Map Bureau. A native RDF semantic web programming language using RDF (OWL Full) concepts in the language as the type system with a Javascript-like syntax. Comes with full documentation, examples and online demonstrations. License: BSD license without no-endorsement clause. Version 2.0 announced 26 March 2004.
• Sesame RDF/RDFS storage and querying facility by Jeen Broekstra and Arjohn Kampman, Aduna. A Java system for RDF and RDF schema that provides data and schema query via SeRQL, RQL and RDQL, backend database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle 9i), a RDF Semantics inferencer, an RDF explorer web application, Ontology Middleware Module by OntoText, syntax support for N-Triples, N3 and RDF/XML via the RIO parser, datatypes including some XSD and more. Downloads and more information available from the sesame SourceForge page. License: Open Source / LGPL. Sesame 1.0 released 25 March 2004.
• Nokia Semantic Web Service for RDF Gateway by Patrick Stickler, Nokia Research. An implementation of the URIQA discovery proposal with a web service and a partial implementation of RDFQ on top of the commercial RDF Gateway product by Intellidimension. License: open source. First announced 25 February 2004.
• Semantic Web Ontology Overview and Perusal (SWOOP) OWL Ontology browser by Aditya Kalyanpur, MINDSWAP group, University of Maryland, College Park, USA. A Java desktop tool for browsing Ontologies in OWL in a hyperlinked thesaurus-style format, using the Jena RDF toolkit. Java Web Start version available. License: unknown (MIT?). Announced 2 February 2004.
• eventSherpa by SemaView. A network service allowing publishing and consuming of event calendars in Apple iCal, mozilla Calendar and RDF forms. Provides a window client for download. License: Commercial application in beta trial. Version 1.2 with enhancements for internationalization, geography and category definition (changes) announced 30 January 2004.
• Progos web based semantic web tools - RDF Browser and tutorial, ontology and RDF Schema generator with documentation. License: free to use for evaluation. Announced 23 December 2003.
• Samizdat open publishing engine by Dmitry Borodaenko. A generic RDF-based engine for building collaboration and open publishing web sites, written in Ruby. It allows cooperative publishing, viewing and editing of resources, ratings, classifications, filtering and focuses. It also provides Pingback support. License GPL2. Version 0.5.0 announced 1 December 2003.
• Sherpa Calendar part of Sherpa Suite by SemaView. Windows applications allowing anyone to easily publish and consume RDF based calendars and their HTML representation. See also the SherpaFind calendar search engine web site and the Sherpa Developers Kit. Commercial applications in beta trial. Announce 29 October 2003.
• RDFMapper - RDF-Based Web Mapping Service by Chris Goad. A service that provides searching of RDF files for resources with geographic locations, and returns a clickable map, via a REST (URL) style interface. Supports several RDF geo vocabularies. Announced 29 July 2003.
• Catalogue 4.0 file explorer, Soft Experience. A Windows utility to gather metadata from HTML, Adobe XMP, MS Office, Staroffice, Mac, PDF, JPEG/TIFF images and other formats and to generate HTML, XML, or RDF reports from them. Can generate RDF or RDF as SVG. See also the sample report. Commercial application. 27 September 2002.
• rdftp server by Vangelis Vassiliadis. A PHP server for RDF content that supports storing in a relational database and access via query and update operations over HTTP. See also the online demo. GPL License. Announced 8 September 2002.
• Semantic Web Server from Empolis. A server running on J2EE that support storage and querying of RDF models along with interoperation of Topic Maps and RDF. See also the publications and technical specification. 13 March 2002.
• Edutella - an RDF-based project (initially in Java) to provide a distributed, queryable, replicated metadata infrastructure for the JXTA peer-to-peer system. The initial application is a P2P network for exchanging educational resources between several universities. 5 March 2002.
• RDFSuite including an RDF Query Language (RQL) V1.0, RDF Schema Specific DataBase (RSSDB) V1.0 and Validating RDF Parser (VRP) V2.0 by Vassilis Christophides and Greg Karvounarakis, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), Crete, Greece. Updated VRP handles embedded RDF in HTML/XML, XML schema data types, Unicode and updated RDF syntax. Site includes an online demo, several related papers and documentation. Software in C++ / Java, license is GPL compatible. 21 November 2001.
• Online RDF-to-XRDF converter at University of Essen, Germany supporting the format defined in the XRDF paper. 22 January 2001.
• CIM/XML language for representing power system models - an application of RDF using a subset of the XML syntax and RDF Schemas. See the Press Release. 27 December 2000.
• CARA Perl RDF API by Stefan Kokkelink, University of Osnabrueck, Germany - free software developed within the CARMEN project. 13 December 2000.
• Xpetal tool for converting UML to RDF by Arnold deVos as part of the Xmodel project. Xpetal accepts Rational Rose petal model files and generates RDF where UML attributes and association roles are mapped to RDF properties. Java source available under LGPL using SAX, TRAX and Xalan. 10 December 2000.
• Squish - complex RDF queries in Java by Libby Miller, ILRT, University of Bristol, UK. Squish is an SQL-like query language for RDF implemented on top of several Java RDF APIs and talking to a back-end SQL database or in-memory model. 7 December 2000.
• Universal Learning Format (PDF version) - a modular set of XML/RDF formats for describing online learning content based on other standards. See also the ULF specifications and tutorial. 4 December 2000.
• XOTcl RDF announced by Gustaf Neumann, University of Wien, Austria. Announcement of RDF support in the Extended Object Tcl (XOTCL) language which is included as part of the XOTcl distribution in source and Linux / Windows binary forms. Includes an online parser demo. 4 December 2000.
• Web Resource Application Framework (WRAF) project whose purpose is "to enable the construction of applications that fully uses the RDF data model in order to realize the Semantic Web.". See also the SourceForge project site. WRAF is written in Perl is is available under the Artistic / GPL license. Latest version 0.0404 announced 2 February 2001.
• MusicBrainz Metadata by CD Index, a Dublin Core metadata application in RDF/XML providing descriptions of CD content - names, artists, track names etc.
• Leveraging UML in RDF communication on RDF-IG by Sergey Melnik, 21 April 2000. An outline of ideas to make UML "RDF-compatible" by representing the UML conceptual model in RDF. See also Sergey's RDF encoding of UML Foundation/Core package
• Ontology Interchange Language (OIL) Project - a project to develop a joint standard for integrating ontologies, using web standards such as RDF, RDF Schemas, XML and XML Schemas. See OIL in a nutshell (PDF) for an introduction.
• RDFPic - a tool to embed an RDF description of an image (digitized photograph) into the image itself. Implements the work described in Describing and retrieving photos using RDF and HTTP. 17 August 2000
• The Zope Project intends to provide RDF Support as part of its Mozilla project. 14 July 2000
• Non-Governmental Organizations Sector Support Program (NGOSS), Moscow, Russia using RDF for organising the site. 10 May 2000.
• The UK Mirror Service is a national UK service providing mirrors / collections of software and data from around the world. It uses RDF internally for mirror description and mirror content description of over 4 million resources. 12 April 2000.
• PICS Rating Vocabularies in XML/RDF, W3C Note, Edited by Dan Brickley, W3C and Ralph Swick, W3C, 27 March 2000.
• The CERES Thesaurus Effort - CERES (California Environmental Resources Evaluation System) and USGS Biological Resource Division are building digital thesauri using RDF. See also CERES' Navigating Digital Environmental Terminology presentation, Jan 2000.
• XWMF - An eXtensible Web Modeling Framework by Alexander Block and Reinhold Klapsing, University of Essen, Germany. XWMF uses one metadata model to specify the structure and the content of a web site and to make statements about the elements of a web site, using RDF. Tools provided include an RDF parser (GPL license), a tool for processing and querying RDF data models (Open Source) and a graphical editor GraMToR for interactive construction of an RDF data model (GPL). All are written in variants of the Tcl language with some supporting libraries needed, 28 December 1999.
• perl RDF parser / visualiser by Eric Prud'Hommeaux of W3C implementing an RDF SAX parser and a simple triple database in perl, 19 December 1999.
• RDF Query in Javascript demo by Dan Brickley, University of Bristol (presently at W3C), 11 November 1999.
• A prototype RDF Schema editor by Jonas Liljegren - an experimental prototype, written in perl, for viewing, editing and navigating in RDF data, based on RDF Schemas.
• John Punin contributed an RDF parser (in C) to the XML module in the W3C Libwww library. 10 September 1999.
• Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC). CORC is a research project exploring the cooperative creation and sharing of metadata by libraries using RDF/XML, MARC, DC and Z39.50 technologies. 5 July 1999.
• The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative data model is based on the RDF data model, and DC implementations will have an RDF/XML encoding amongst others. 16 December 1998.
• RDF Parser - web interface to SiRPAC parser, hosted at UKOLN, 28 November 1998.
• RDF Browser at the W3C site. Enter some RDF and send it to the server to validate, show triple and visually browse (Requires Java). Based on the SiRPAC - Simple RDF Parser & Compiler by Janne Saarela, W3C who also created this service. 16 November 1998.
• Daniel Veillard's Linux Packages Metadata Mirroring Proposal, 25 May 1998

Resource Description Framework Tutorials and Examples

If you want to learn RDF and see examples of RDF markup, there is some information in the main standards documents above as well as these:

• MITRE RDF and OWL tutorials by Roger L. Costello and David Jacobs: XML Design (A Gentle Transition from XML to RDF), Inferring and Discovering Relationships using RDF Schemas and OWL Web Ontology Language. 31 March 2003.
• RDF Tutorial, Miloslav Nic, Zvon.org - a series of RDF examples with short descriptions. Available from the Zvon download area as zip or tar.gz archives. August 2000.
• RDF Tutorial (HTML - PS and PDF also available), Pierre-Antoine Champin, University of Lyon, France, 9 March 2000.
• Examples maintained by Andy Powell, UKOLN
• Dublin Core Examples in RDF, Eric Miller and Renato Iannella, 6 March 1998
• Resource Description Framework Documents and Examples at DSTC RDU, Australia

RDF and the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the Web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications.
W3C Semantic Web Activity Statement

• W3C Semantic Web Activity - "Developing an environment to permit each user to make the best use of the resources available on the Web", launched 9 February 2001
• W3C Semantic Web Activity Statement, 10 February 2001
• For an overview see the Scientific American article by Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Lassila.

Other Semantic Web resources:

• See also the documents and publications sections for other RDF / Semantic Web resources.
• DARPA Agent Markup Language for Services (DAML-S) - a DAML+OIL-based Web service ontology for describing the properties and capabilities of web services. Includes a Grounding ontology that ties DAML-S with Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Version 0.7 announced 11 October 2002.
• Concept to Reality: What the emerging Semantic Web means to your Business (PDF), whitepaper from Semaview Inc, 29 August 2002.
• SemanticWeb.gr - A Semantic Web portal based in Greece run by Vangelis Vassiliadis. 14 April 2002.
• From Aristotle to the 'semantic web' by Alan Gilchrist, Library Association Record, Volumne 104(1), January 2002.
• Towards the Semantic Web: Knowledge Representation in a Dynamic, Distributed Environment PhD thesis by Jeff Heflin, while at University of Maryland, College Park, USA. Available in PDF and Postscript. 10 October 2001.
• The Semantic Web: An Introduction by Sean B. Palmer - a general introduction to the semantic web, its aims, various terms and technologies. 17 September 2001.
• Machines to talk intelligently on Web, Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News, 25 August 2001.
• Semantic Web Primer by William Loughborough. A short introduction to the semantic web. 20 July 2001.
• The Semantic Web, Taking Form, Sean B. Palmer, 11 June 2001.
• Agents on the Semantic Web, James Hendler, pre-print of article in IEEE Intelligent Systems, March/April 2001. Last updated 10 May 2001.
• The Semantic Web - "A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities", by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila, Scientifc American, May 2001.
• NNTP, IMAP, And The Semantic Web, Jon Udell in 5 parts including part 5: Writing The Semantic Web, BYTE, 25 April 2001.
• Scientific publishing on the "semantic web", Tim Berners-Lee and James Hendler, Nature debates on Future e-access to the primary literature, 12 April 2001.
• Tim Berners-Lee on the W3C's Semantic Web Activity - Interview with Edd Dumbill on XML.com. 21 March 2001.
• Building the Semantic Web, Edd Dumbill on XML.com adapted from closing keynote at Knowledge Technologies 2001, 7 March 2001.
• Making the Web Semantic - "an overview of the semantic web from a pragmatic standpoint" by Joshua Allen, Microsoft (almost certainly not speaking for them). 11 February 2001.
• Semantic Web Agreement Group (SWAG) - a group working to create infrastructural agreements for the Semantic Web for interoperability of SW applications. 24 January 2001.
• Semantic Web Technologies Workshop. Reports on the EU ... Information Access, Filtering, Analysis and Handling ... (40+ word title) workshop held in Luxembourg from 22-23 November 2000 in Diffuse Project. See also official presentations (links to mostly PowerPoint slides) and report (MS Word). December 2000.
• Semantic Web, keynote presentation by Tim Berners-Lee at XML2000, 6 December 2000.
• Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web Vision, Edd Dumbill, XML.com, 6 December 2000.

• DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) - "The goal of the DAML effort is to develop a language and tools to facilitate the concept of the semantic web." and it uses RDF and RDF schemas to do this. Public DAML discussion mostly takes place on the rdf-logic list. Some resources are:

  • DAML Research Project, Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University
  • An Axiomatic Semantics for RDF, RDF Schema, and DAML-ONT in HTML, Text, MS Word by Richard Fikes and Deborah L. McGuinness, Stanford University. Draft dated 29 November 2000.
  • DAML Ontology Language Specification (First Release) by Stein et al., October 2000.
  • DAML Ontology Library - a catalog of ontologies developed using DAML.
  • DAML draft syntax by Ralph Swick, August 2000.
  • DAML could take search to a new level - New query language being developed for Defense Department helps agents understand content, PC Week Online, 7 February 2000.
• The Semantic Web: A Primer, Edd Dumbill on XML.com, 1 November 2000.
• Semantic Web Interface Development mailing list (SWI-DEV) - forum to discuss Semantic Web interface technologies development, owned by Sean B. Palmer. The message archives are also available for browsing. November 2000.
• SemanticWeb.org - Semantic Web Community Portal - a portal for the Sematic Web with a concentration on the formal aspects - Knowledge Representation, Inferencing, Logics and Ontologies by Stefan Decker
• Future of the Web, keynote presentation by Tim Berners-Lee and Ralph Swick given at WWW 9, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 16 May 2000.
• Seeds of the Semantic Web, presentation by Dan Connolly given at ALA Midwinter Meeting 2000, San Antonio, USA. January 2000.
• The Semantic Toolbox: Building Semantics on top of XML-RDF, Tim Berners-Lee, 'personal ramblings, May 1999.
• Understanding RDF: the Resource Description Framework in Context presentation given at the EC Metadata Workshop by Dan Brickley in HTML or PowerPoint with notes. 12 April 1999.
• The Semantic Web Road Map and What the semantic Web isn't but can represent, Tim Berners-Lee, work in progress, September 1998.

RDF Site Summary (RSS)

RDF Site Summary (RSS) is a lightweight multipurpose extensible metadata description and syndication format based on RDF and derived from previous RSS versions. Netscape invented and first described RSS 0.9 for the My.Netscape Network (where R=RDF) and later used RSS 0.91 (where R=Rich)

RDF RSS resources

• Perl XML::RSS module by brian d foy and Ian Davis, supporting reading and generating many versions of RSS include modules. Version 1.02 announced 4 March 2003.
• PHP and XML: Parsing RSS 1.0 by Kevin Yank, Sitepoint, 18 September 2001
• Zvon RSS references - RSS 0.9 (Rich Site Summary), RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0 Core, 30 May 2001
• The Evolution of RSS by Andrew King, WebReference.com - comprehensive article on RSS in all flavours. 7 May 2001
• RSS 1.0 Specification, various authors, 6 December 2000
• Redland RSS 1.0 Viewer - a web demo for validating and viewing RSS 1.0 content in detail or in a portal-like box by Dave Beckett, Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol. [Disclosure: the editor of this guide]. 8 November 2000.
• RSS-DEV list for discussing RSS 1.0
• Lists of public RSS 1.0 feeds - RSS-Dev and RSS Info
• Writing RSS 1.0 by Rael Dornfest, XML.com, 25 August 2000.
• RSS moves forward by Edd Dumbill, XML.com, 14 August 2000.
• RDF - why we should care - and RSS by Edd Dumbill, XML.com, 3 June 2000.

XML RSS resources

• Userland RSS 0.93 by Dave Winer based on RSS 0.91 and RSS 0.92 - still under development. This is discussed on the Real Simple Syndication list (moderated). 20 April 2001.
• Userland RSS 0.92 by Dave Winer made some optional changes to RSS 0.91 to drop the language element, point to XML source of items, add enclosures and support for clouds - an XML-RPC/SOAP publish/subscribe service for pushing updates. 25 December 2000.
• Userland RSS 0.91 by Dave Winer and Dave's version of the history of RSS and What to do about RSS?. Dan Brickley's version of the history of RSS.
• RSS 0.9x (and sometimes 1.0) is mostly discussed on the syndication list

Other RSS resources

• RSSup - tool to allow users of RSS .91 feed to generate RDF-compliant RSS 1.0 feeds.
• WebReference.com RSS
• RSS Info provides news about RSS (all versions) by Aaron Swartz.
• O'Reilly RSS Devcenter and O'Reilly Network RSS Articles
• O'Reilly Meerkat: An Open Wire Service with its about Meerkat which contains useful pointers.

Personal Opinions on RDF

Editorial comment: the links in this area may not be technical documents and may be critical of RDF.

• RDF - The Ethics Police, by Wingnut, July 1999.

Other Resource Description Framework Resources

• XML and RDF Watch by Bob Jensen, Trinity University.
• RDF survey by Reinhold Klapsing, University of Essen, Germany. Lots of similar content to this page :-)
• NetQuest JTAP project on RDF and IMS - Dan Brickley, ILRT, Bristol, UK - a 1 year study to investigate using RDF with the Instructional Management System (IMS) initiative for online learning applications.
• UKOLN Metadata Resources for RDF
• The Web Developer's Virtual Library: Resource Description Framework (RDF)
• OASIS XML Cover Pages - Resource Description Framework (RDF) by Robin Cover
• WAVE (Web Analysis and Visualization Environment) RDF to CKML (Conceptual Knowledge Markup Language) now offline but might reappear at ontologos, Robert E. Kent, October 1997.
• Metadata Projects at the W3C, Eric Miller, OCLC, 15 July 1997.
• W3C Data Formats Note
• DC Data Model Mailing List
• DC Date Working Group Report and Report

Related Work

• DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) project bases its work on RDF and RDF Schemas.
• Dublin Core Metadata Initiative uses RDF/XML extensively in its data model and in applications.
• XML Schema Part 1: Structures, W3C Working Draft (work in progress), Henry S. Thomson, David Beech, Murray Maloney, Noah Mendelsohn, eds., 17 December 1999.

  This document proposes facilities for describing the structure and constraining the contents of XML 1.0 documents. The schema language, which is itself represented in XML 1.0, provides a superset of the capabilities found in XML 1.0 document type definitions (DTDs).

• Document Definition Markup Language (DDML) Specification, W3C Note, Edited by Ronald Bourret, John Cowan, Ingo Macherius, Simon St. Laurent, 19 Jan 1999. Previously known as XSchema.
  

  DDML [is] a schema language for XML documents. DDML encodes the logical (as opposed to physical) content of DTDs in an XML document. This allows schema information to be explored and used with widely available XML tools.

• Document Content Description for XML (DCD), W3C NOTE, Tim Bray, Charles Frankston (Microsoft) and Ashok Malhotra (IBM), 31 July 1998.
  "Based on XML-Data and RDF" and "DCD is an RDF vocabulary".
• ISO 13250 Topic Maps and their XML grammar (XML Topic Maps - XTM) have similar applications to RDF - allowing semantics to be associated with networked resources. See also the XTM list.
• XMLNews - A suite of specifications for exchanging news and information using open Web standards

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