Two Web Standards That Will Change the World August 16
Unless you follow the often arcane world of web standards and the organization that defines them, you probably haven’t heard much about two emerging standards that by some credible accounts will do more to change the landscape of the internet than anything since the web itself: RDF and SPARQL.
Part of what makes these technologies so compelling is their elegance: they are incredibly simple and yet have the potential to yield extremely powerful and useful results. (NB: while this entry focuses on RDF and SPARQL, these are only two pieces of a larger heirarchy of standards and frameworks designed to help realize the semantic web as a widespread and practical technology.)
RDF, or Resource Description Framework, is a collection of methods for structuring information and representing knowledge. The goal is to enable applications to automatically catalogue and exchange information based on common sets of meaningful terms, or ontologies. In its simplest form, RDF statements are triples of the form (a,b,c) representing subject-predicate-object statements. It’s a subtle but powerful tool that can enable the efficient sharing of facts — e.g., (”Kinshasa”,”isCapitalOf”,”Democratic Republic of Congo”) might be a representation of a fact about an African nation’s capital (note that the same triple can be used to derive information about both the subject and object). [...]
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