RDF (NX-C012) | NucLex

RDF

Fully specified name: RDF (concept)

The Resource Description Framework, a W3C model for statements expressed through subject, predicate, and object.

Scope note

Distinguish representation from storage implementation.

Synonyms

Resource Description Framework

Monograph

Semantic web standards (planned; brief only)

External mappings

None recorded. In W0 no mapping to SNOMED CT® or any external authority is asserted for this entry. A future mapping record will carry source system, identifier, version, relation type, evidence, author, confidence where meaningful, and review state.

Formal status

Editorial entry only. It is not part of any released ontology and a prose edit here changes no formal definition.

Draft. This entry is an unreviewed draft. Its sources have not been checked by a named person and no domain reviewer has approved it. Treat every claim as provisional.

Notes

RDF (Resource Description Framework) is the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) data model for making statements about things. Every statement is a triple: a subject, a predicate, and an object, where subject and predicate are identified by IRIs (Internationalized Resource Identifiers) and the object is either an IRI or a literal value. A set of triples is a graph. The model says nothing about how triples are stored; the same graph may be written in several serializations (Turtle, JSON-LD, RDF/XML, N-Triples) and held in a triple store, a relational database, or a text file.

For an informatician RDF is the lingua franca of linked data and the substrate on which OWL ontologies are expressed. For a physician or scientist its importance is indirect: when a terminology or a Knowledge graph is published as RDF, its assertions can be merged with others that use the same identifiers, and the question of whether two systems mean the same thing becomes a question about shared IRIs rather than about matching strings. The scope note separates the abstract model from any product that implements it. A vendor's graph database is not RDF, though it may store RDF. The RDF 1.1 Primer is the authoritative introduction.

Notes

Related entries