For this month’s blog entry I originally planned to create a reference for RDF serialization formats. My idea was to create a table listing all the known formats, with links to their specs (when they have one), their age, origin, a sample, and some opinionated comments–for example, why creating new documents in RDF/XML made sense in 1999 but no longer does.

I recently did a review of options for creating visual representations of RDF data. I didn’t just want a general visualization tool, but something that understood RDF enough to represent class instances and literal values differently. I will emphasize instances because several tools out there can read RDF schema or ontologies and create a visualization of classes and their relationships and potential properties, but I want to see instances with their property values.

Several years ago in the blog post RDF* and SPARQL* I described how I had played with implementations of the new reification syntax that Olaf Hartig and Bryan Thompson proposed in their paper Foundations of an Alternative Approach to Reification in RDF. I found the new syntax to be straightforward and useful. As you can see from the recent W3C Community Group Report RDF-star and SPARQL-star, this syntax has progressed—with a more search-engine-friendly spelling of the spec’s name—closer to…

In my last blog entry I discussed various ways that different RDF datasets assign human-readable labels to resources, with the rdfs:label property being at the center of them all. I mentioned how schema.org doesn’t use rdfs:label but its own equivalent of that, schema:name, which its schema declares as a subproperty of rdfs:label. Since I wrote that, Fan Li pointed out that Facebook’s Open Graph protocol also has their own equivalent: og:title, which you can see used in the HTML…

First, reviewing some basics before I discuss the edge cases: resources in RDF are represented by URIs, and the spelling of a given URI often provides no clues about what the URI represents. For example, you wouldn’t know from looking at http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q144 that it represents “dog” as a Wikipedia topic. (We’ll see below that this is a for a good reason.)

The following blog entries give a brief introduction to the RDF data model, the most important of the other W3C standards that build on it, and what people do with those standards:

I recently wondered “could I run a Python script that includes the rdflib library on my Samsung Android phone?” Five minutes later, I was doing it, and about three of those minutes were spent installing Python.

OriginTrail is doing one of the most interesting combinations of blockchain technology and RDF that I have seen. In November I spoke with CTO and co-founder Branimir Rakić.