ABSTRACT
Resource Description Framework (RDF) was first introduced to provide machine-understandable description of resources. While the term resource was originally intended to be synonymous with the generic “object of the network” (RFC 1630; Berners-Lee 1994), years of research, development, and evolution of the Semantic Web have imbued it with a different and broader meaning. The first extension of the notion of resource to “anything that has identity” occurred in August 1998, with the advent of RFC 2396 (Berners-Lee et al. 1998) and in January 2005 was broadened to include abstract concepts (RFC 3986; Berners-Lee et al. 2005). The history of RDF has thus been closely paired with the evolution of the concept of the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) as a means to reference or identify things. Consequently, RDF, a language originally designed to describe digital artifacts in a machine-understandable fashion, has become the standard descriptive language of the Semantic Web.
