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RDF and OWL Are W3C Recommendations

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the standardization-baby dept.

J1 writes "The World Wide Web Consortium today released the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) as W3C Recommendations. RDF is used to represent information and to exchange knowledge in the Web. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, supporting advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management. Read the press release for the full list of twelve documents, read the testimonials, and visit the Semantic Web home page."

4 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is good news by SandHawk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While I'm all for better markup, there's quite a jump from proper use of "semantic markup" in HTML to RDF. RDF is quite another language.

  2. Re:This is good news by jilles · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > A lot of W3C standards seem overlooked by some pretty big sites.

    That is because there are a lot of very complex standards with little or no toolsupport. Most of the implementations of the major w3c standards are incomplete and/or inconsistent with the specification.

    As a content provider (i.e. a website maintainer) there is no point in producing stuff that the majority of the visitors cannot display. Basically anything beyond xhtml1.0 and a subset of CSS1 & 2 w3c standards compliant documents are totally pointless if the intention is that anyone can access them.

    BTW. I agree that slashdot is long overdue in supporting standards. Sites like wired.com and espn.com show that it is possible to save bandwidth (considering that /. partially depends on donations/subscriptions they owe it to their paying readers not to waste pennies on that) and deliver content in a standards compatible way.

    --

    Jilles
  3. Re:This is good news by jdh-22 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I totally agree. It wasn't too long ago that an article on A List Apart that described what Slashdot could to redesign it with web standards Not only would it make Slashdot comply with web standards, it would save them 3-14gb of bandwidth a day!

    --
    Every Super Villan uses Linux.
  4. models are imperfect by SandHawk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This connects with his mistaken point that the Semantic Web is based on some single universal ontology. This is of course the opposite of what RDF is about -- it's about allowing lots of ontologies to be used side by side.

    So we don't model the real world perfectly, we model it well enough for some set of applications in some ontology. Every database designer, nearly every programmer does this all the time. We model it well enough and then the computers... do what computers do.

    RDF is nothing new here. What's new is establishing a fairly wide and precise consensus around a language for communicating data about arbitrary things.