The Resource Description Framework (RDF) - developed by the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - provides the foundation for metadata interoperability across different resource description communities. One of the major obstacles facing the resource description community is the multiplicity of incompatible standards for metadata syntax and schema definition languages. This has lead to the lack of, and low deployment of, cross-discipline applications and services for the resource description communities. RDF provides a solution to these problems via a Syntax specification (W3C, 1999a) and Schema specification (W3C, 1998a). RDF is based on Web technologies and, as a result, is lightweight and highly deployable. RDF provides interoperability between applications that exchange metadata and is targeted for many application areas including; resource description, site-maps, content rating, electronic commerce, collaborative services, and privacy preferences. RDF is the result of members of these communities reaching consensus on their syntactical needs and deployment efforts. The objective of RDF is to support the interoperability of metadata. RDF allows descriptions of Web resources - any object with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) as its address - to be made available in machine understandable form. This enables the semantics of objects to be expressible and exploitable. Once highly deployed, this will enable services to develop processing rules for automated decision-making about Web resources. ('jp jp',) An Idiot's Guide to the Resource Description Framework text/html None en 9998-12-31 00:00:00 2002-06-26 20:49:50 http://www.dstc.edu.au/cgi-bin/redirect/rd.cgi?http://archive.dstc.edu.au/RDU/reports/RDF-Idiot/ 2002-01-07 16:08:36 () 0