A co-worker recently told me that he was considering using OWL for something but didn’t want to deal with all that XML. It was disappointing to hear this in the year 2023, but I guess those early images of RDF/XML being used to implement OWL restriction classes really scared some people off.

There have been other occasions where I wanted to suggest that someone could learn the basics of RDF, OWL, and the related standards by reading the introductions I did for each as blog entries in 2021, but I hate to send these people five URLs or tell them to go to the list of 2021 entries and read the June through October entries in the reverse of the order shown.

So now there’s one URL for a table of contents page at A brief introduction to RDF, related standards, and what they can do for you. It lists the relevant entries, in order, with a brief description of each. I hope that it’s useful for others who want to provide a simple, brief—if a bit opinionated—introduction to those who want to ramp up quickly on these topics. (I didn’t mean for this table of contents page to be displayed with the full blog entry theming, but to take advantage of the CSS and so forth that I’m using with the Hugo blog engine I just used the existing template without creating a new one for it.)

I wrote a similar article many years ago titled RDF, The Semantic Web, and Linked Data that did a broader summary with references to many more blog entries. Much of that, such as its references to XMP and RDFa, are quite dated now. That might be interesting to people for its historical perspective from 2009, but the brevity of this new summary that I wrote should make it more helpful overall.

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