What is the Resource Description Framework (RDF)?
The RDF home page (http://www.w3.org/RDF/Overview.html) says “RDF is designed to provide an infrastructure to support metadata across many web-based activities.” It is very verbose, when used to mark up elements. RDF is also quite complex to understand. The lesson of SGML is that there are great benefits in marking up documents generically, according to document type, rather than than with specific details for each element. This is the only way to handle large data sets, in many cases. Applying this lesson to RDF, it is probable that RDF will be most beneficial when applied to element types rather than to element instances: the element type becomes a kind of macro for the RDF. RDF is frequently mentioned in material about Dublin Core. But you can use Dublin Core without RDF. RDF provides extra value to Dublin Core metadata. Generic RDF tools (for example, for visualization and discovery) will be able to use DC+RDF data even though they do not understand Dublin Core elements. RDF is not
