RDFS, or RDF Schema, is a W3C standard specialized vocabulary for describing RDF vocabularies and data models. Before I discuss it further, though, I’d like to explain why the use of standardized, specialized vocabularies (whether RDFS itself or a vocabulary that someone uses RDFS to describe) can be useful beyond the advantages of sharing a vocabulary with others for easier interoperability.

I’ve been hearing more about the Blazegraph triplestore (well, “graph database with RDF support”), especially its support for running on GPUs, and because they also advertise some degree of RDFS and OWL support, I wanted to see how quickly I could try that after downloading the community edition. It was pretty quick.

Last May, in Adding semantics to make data more valuable: the secret revealed, I showed how storing a little bit of semantics about the word “spouse”—the fact that it’s a symmetric property (that is, that if A is the spouse of B, then B is the spouse of A)—let me look up someone’s home phone number in my address book even if my entry for him there lacks his home phone number. I like this story because unlike biotech and some of the other popular domains for Semantic Web…

I’ve known for a while about ways to dig into the vocabularies used in DBpedia’s massive collection of triples, and I’ve used terms from these vocabularies to query for information such as Bart Simpson blackboard messages and US presidents’ ages at inauguration. I saw these terms as “field” names to use when querying this body of data.

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After writing a few paid articles and doing a lot of blogging about various issues, features, and trends surrounding the Semantic Web, Linked Data, RDF, RDFa, SPARQL, OWL, and related tools and implementations, I thought it would be nice if I could tie them together into something resembling a cohesive whole. So, I wrote a short essay titled RDF, The Semantic Web, and Linked Data with over 70 footnote links to these various pieces. It will be a handy reference for me in the future, and I hope it…

My old friend Dale Waldt (I remember, immediately after the announcement of the existence of XML at SGML 1996, going up to my then-coworker Dale and asking “So what do we think?”) recently posted an entry on the Gilbane XML blog titled Why Adding Semantics to Web Data is Difficult. A few days ago I posted a comment saying that the things that he saw as missing from semantic technologies are actually already there and working well, but my reply hasn’t shown up yet, so after a…