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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."

7 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. This is good news by byolinux · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Semantic Web is a interesting progression. Maybe hopefully more sites will start to use better markup on their websites now. A lot of W3C standards seem overlooked by some pretty big sites.

    Surely it's about time for Slashdot to go XHTML+CSS?

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    1. Re:This is good news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Surely it's about time for Slashdot to go XHTML+CSS?

      I'd be thrilled if they even just went to valid HTML. Then we could move to a nice HTML 4.01 transitional with CSS. Heck, they still haven't replaced their .gifs with 8-bit .pngs which would save them a chunk bandwidth (it all adds up!).

  2. The semantic web... by schon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When I first read about "the semantic web", my first thoughts were "how the hell is this useful?"

    About a year later, I noticed that Clay Shirkey had written an interesting article on the Semantic Web...

    It's a bit of a long read, but it does sum up the issues with it quite handily.

    1. Re:The semantic web... by schon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      My actual response at the time is brief and chatty. The response from Dan Brickley is also short and sweet.

      Thanks, I find both of these much better than the two you gave - you're both pretty succinct.

      One issue I have with Brickley's response is his criticism of Shirkey's alternative that we 'do nothing'.. he seems to have fallen inot the trap of 'we should to do something, this is something, therefore we should do this' (if you'll pardon the syllogism. :o)

      Sometimes it is better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing; even if you don't see anything better, once that something better does come along, it is often difficult to undo that something once it's become entrenched. (Note, I'm not saying that's what's happening here, this is just a general response to someone who implies that doing nothing is always worse than doing something.)

      The "misquoting" is to suggest that my "how you buy a book on the Semantic Web" sketch should possibly cause Jeff Bezos to lose sleep. I was trying to explain an experimental protocol in a way I hoped my grandmother could understand

      Ahh, I see.. I remember that passage pretty well.. I didn't put too much stock into the 'Jeff Bezos' comment - to me, it sounded like a joke, I don't think he was seriously suggesting that anyone involved in the SW project had any such plans for Amazon (or anyone else.)

      All in all, thanks for your responses, they've been quite informative.

  3. Microsoft Reporting Services by airrage · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Microsoft has already decided to use the RDF standard in it's XML based reporting solution. The interesting thing with this product is it's being touted as a open-source like product: reports are XML based, no binary required to view them, rdf would be a standard, reports are HTML-viewed, no required viewer. Which is funny that Microsoft is trying to break into the reporting market by being generic to break the hold of the current slew of companies that hold the monopoly there with more proprietary solutions.

    Interesting don't ya think?

    Peace Out.

    --
    "This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
  4. Review vocabulary by Deraj+DeZine · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been looking for some sort of RDF review vocabulary so that I can incorporate product reviews into RSS feeds (but also store them seperately in a complete archive or something). With some sort of review aggregator/grabber, it seems like this would be simple to find out if your friends (as opposed to zealots) liked/disliked a product. The best-looking review vocabulary I've found is the Ideagraph one. Any tools that support reviews with such a format? Or any repositories for RDF reviews? Other formats?

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    True story.
  5. Re:About RDF by SandHawk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    RDF/XML uses XML namespaces as a somewhat convenient way to write URIs (which are normally quite long).

    RDF (in the abstract) doesn't use namespaces, it just uses URIs (aka URLs). (The concept of namespaces is still there in effect, as a collection of related names, in an ontology -- but that's quite different from the formalism of XML Namespaces.)