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Canadian Company Claims RDF Patent

Posted by timothy on from the patenting dept.

quinticent writes: "Looks like they are at it again. Companies seem to like to let a standard become, well, standard before pulling out the lawyers to claim they own a patent on it. Now some Canadian company is claiming they own a US patent on RDF (doesn't Slashdot use RDF?). When will the US government realize that allowing patents on common ideas is just wrong? The CNet article is here."

4 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Yep, slashdot has it by Cheetah86 · · Score: 5, Informative

    (doesn't Slashdot use RDF?)

    Here it is.

    1. Re:Yep, slashdot has it by Alsee · · Score: 5, Informative
      I do not want to sound stupid, but here it is anyway. What is RDF?

      Resource Description Framework

      Here's a link to the W3C standards site about it.

      1. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) integrates a variety of applications from library catalogs and world-wide directories to syndication and aggregation of news, software, and content to personal collections of music, photos, and events using XML as an interchange syntax.


      I don't know squat about RDF, but it sounds like a list of what kind of stuff is available on a website.

      Slashdot.RDF looks like directions to the main page, the motto (News for nerds, stuff that matters), the logo, the most recent stories, and the search page.

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      - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
  2. Endo-Dynamic by adamy · · Score: 5, Informative

    They sure love that word.

    As endo means inner and Dynamic means changing, I guess they are sayinga an internally reconfigurable system.Or a system that can react without external interference. Sounds like anything that is based on
    an interpreter/parser to me...but anyway

    (a) generating an information structure and relationship in the memory of the computer as one or more Endo-Dynamic Sets (EDS), the EDS comprising a list of one or more Endo-Dynamic Information Nodes (EDINs), the EDINs each representing an atomic component of data, and the EDINs each comprising a subject identifier, an attribute identifier, and a bond identifier, wherein the bond identifier defines a relationship between the subject and attribute identifiers;

    OK, we got a two objects, and a relationship between them. Hashtable, anyone?

    Maybe there is some subtlety hidden in all that gibberish. I am a programmer, and I have trouble reading it, I feel sorry for the poor bloke at the patent office that had to struggle through it...assuming one did.

    I realize that most computer programs, converted to english, would probably translate as well as that one did. Wopuldn't it be eiser if they just tried to patent their original source code.

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    Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
  3. RDF vs RSS by burtonator · · Score: 5, Informative

    Slashdot does not use RDF.

    What you are thinking of is the slashdot RSS feed.

    This is not true RDF. This is actually Rich Site Summary.

    Early in the development of RSS there was a slight intermingling with RDF.

    The only current remant is the shared RDF namespace that RSS 1.0 uses. Slashdot uses RSS 0.9 so I can understand the confusion.

    True RDF is REALLY cool and I hope this patent gets knocked back to /dev/null where it belongs. RDF can be used to create very complex graphs which computer systems can understand.

    We are working on a distributed Reputation system and RDF graphs will probably play a major role.

    Also. If you are interested in doing some cool stuff with RSS I would recommend checking out Reptile

    Kevin