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The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a general-purpose language for representing information in the Web. This specification describes how to use RDF to describe RDF vocabularies. This specification also defines a basic vocabulary for this purpose, as well as conventions that can be used by Semantic Web applications to support more sophisticated RDF vocabulary description.
This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document.
EDITOR'S WORKING COPY! This is not yet a W3C WD.
This document is a Working Draft of the RDF Core Working group, and has been produced as part of the Semantic Web Activity and a revision of the Candidate Recommendation of March 27 2000,
The Resource Description Framework is part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity. The goal of this activity, and of RDF specifically, is to produce a language for the exchange of machine-understandable information using the Web. Separate specifications describes the RDF data model and syntax.@@primer etc here
It is inappropriate to use a W3C Working Draft as reference material or to cite them as other than "work in progress". This is work in progress and does not imply endorsement by, or the consensus of W3C. A list of current W3C Recommendations and other technical documents can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR.
@@check before publication
The language defined in this specification consists of a
collection of RDF resources that can be used to describe
properties of other RDF resources (including properties)
which define application-specific RDF vocabularies. The core
vocabulary is defined in a namespace informally called
'rdfs' here, and identified by the URI reference
http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#. This
specification also uses the prefix 'rdf' to
refer to the core RDF namespace
http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#.
Editorial Note: this Working Draft does not propose a change to the namespace URIs use, nor to the prefix 'rdfs' traditionally used to indicate the vocabulary description language's namespace URI . The Working Group seek seekback from implementors on the costs and benefits of moving to a new RDFS namespace URI.
| rdfs:Resource | All things described by RDF are called resources, and are members of the class rdfs:Resource. |
| rdfs:Literal | rdfs:Literal represents to the self-denoting nodes called the 'literals' in the RDF graph structure. Atomic values such as textual strings are examples of RDF literals. |
| rdfs:Class | This corresponds to the generic concept of a type or category of resource. RDF class membership is used to represent types or categories of resource. Two classes may happen to have the same members, while remaining distinct resources. |
| rdf:Property |
rdf:Property represents those resources that are
RDF properties. |
| rdf:type |
The
rdf:type property indicates that a resource
is a member of a class.
When a resource has an
rdf:type property whose
value is some specific class, we say that the resource is an
instance of the specified class.
The value of an rdf:type property will always be
a resource that is an instance of rdfs:Class.
The resource known as rdfs:Class is itself a
resource of rdf:type rdfs:Class. |
| rdfs:subClassOf |
The rdfs:subClassOf property represents a
specialisation relationhip between classes of resource. The
rdfs:subClassOf property is transitive. |
| rdfs:subPropertyOf |
The property
Sub-property hierarchies can be used to express hierarchies
of range and domain constraints. All |
| rdfs:range |
An instance of
The value of an rdfs:range property is only applied to
properties. This can also be represented in RDFusing the
rdfs:domain property. The rdfs:domain
of rdfs:range is the class
rdf:Property. This indicates that the
range property applies to resources that are
themselves properties. |
| rdfs:domain |
An instance of
The
The Note: range, domain and sub-property hierarchies
Sub-property hierarchies can be used to express hierarchies
of range and domain constraints. All |
| rdfs:label |
The |
| rdfs:comment |
The A textual comment helps clarify the meaning of RDF classes and properties. Such inline documentation complements the use of both formal techniques (Ontology and rule languages) and informal (prose documentation, examples, test cases). A variety of documentation forms can be combined to indicate the intended meaning of the classes and properties described in an RDF Schema.
Multilingual documentation of schemas is supported at the
syntactic level through use of the |
| rdfs:Container |
The |
| rdf:Bag |
The |
| rdf:Seq |
The |
| rdf:Alt |
The |
| rdfs:ContainerMembershipProperty |
The |
| rdfs:member |
The |