RDF/OWL
Resource Description Framework / Web Ontology Language
Judgement: Situational
Semantic-web foundation; right when reasoning/inference matter.
RDF is the W3C model for representing graph data; OWL extends it for richer ontologies and reasoning. Together they are the foundation of the semantic web.
YAML formats like ODCS and Apache Ossie buy simplicity at the cost of composability. RDF/OWL trade off the other way: harder to author, much easier to compose vocabularies that were never designed together.
Example
Classes and properties as triples; the same graph carries both the vocabulary and the data.
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix ex: <https://example.com/ontology#> .
ex:Order a owl:Class ;
rdfs:label "Order" .
ex:placedBy a owl:ObjectProperty ;
rdfs:domain ex:Order ;
rdfs:range ex:Customer .
ex:order-1001 a ex:Order ;
ex:placedBy ex:customer-42 .At a glance
- Category
- Semantics
- Governance
- W3C
- Status
- Stable; foundation of the semantic web
- First released
- 1999
Links
Related standards
Other standards in Semantics.
- DCAT — Data Catalog Vocabulary
- JSON-LD — JSON for Linking Data
- SHACL — Shapes Constraint Language
- SKOS — Simple Knowledge Organization System
- Ossie — Apache Ossie (incubating)
- schema.org — schema.org vocabulary
- ShEx — Shape Expressions Language
See RDF/OWL in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare RDF/OWL against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.