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.
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.
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.
Related entries
Sources consulted (1)
- https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-primer/