ABSTRACT
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist widely credited with inventing the World Wide Web. The W3C has become the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web, and has developed standards for important technologies such as HTML, CGI, and CSS. The W3C standards for XML, URIs, and RDF are of particular importance for the Semantic Web. However, documentation on the standards is often distributed over multiple Web pages and multiple versions and much of it is written in a highly technical style that can be difficult to understand. This appendix will present enough background on XML, URIs, and the syntax of RDF that readers will be able to understand RDF(S) or OWL ontologies that are serialized in the RDF/XML or OWL/XML formats, rather than to present a comprehensive treatment. Suggestions for further reading are presented at the end of the appendix.
