Melody Smith

Linked Data, DOI, RDF, and Dublin Core

On a quest to reach the holy grail of the Semantic Web. What started as a straightforward and elegant model by Eric Miller as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) has become incredibly complicated. When I first came upon this model, in the early days of the Dublin Core standard discussions, it was a framework. That is, it was a self describing way to transmit an XML file. The RDF formed a wrapper around the XML by including the XML Schema (DTD) so that whoever received the file would know what the elements, attributes, allowed ranges, etc. were, and be able to use the data included without further hunting for file descriptions, translations of the fields (elements), how they related, etc. RDF has grown up and become embroiled in discussions of triples, Subject-Object-Predicate discussions, and its use as the basis for linked data and even the basis for the final real implementation of the Semantic Web.