Resource

Description
Framework
VS.

eXtensible
Markup
Language
Arunabh Nag 03/02/10
1
 Introduction

• The Extensible Markup Language

(XML)
• The Resource Description Framework
(RDF)
• Semantic Web – Distributing knowledge

03/02/10
2
 XML – basic stats

• design goals - emphasize simplicity, generality,

and usability over the Internet.
• textual data format, with strong support via
Unicode.
• designed to transport and store data, with focus on
what data is.

• allows the author to define his own tags and his

own document structure.
03/02/10
3
 RDF – basic stats

• a framework for describing resources on the web.

• designed to be read and understood by computers.
• written in XML.
• RDF is a data model, not a data format.
• The most exciting uses of RDF aren't in encoding information
about web resources, but information about and relations
between things in the real world: people, places, concepts,
etc.

03/02/10
4
 RDF vs.
• RDF is constituted of • XML documents are made
Properties, Values, and
Statements that can be
resources and include
metadata created by other
people and organizations
XML
up of storage units called
entities, which contain
either text Or binary data.
Text is made up of
characters, some of which
form the character data in
the document, and some of
which form markup.
03/02/10
5
 RDF
• Order of properties is not
a primary concern, hence
RDF offers a very
appealing and flexible
solution to any web
designer.
• This is due to the fact that
RDF has a graphical data
model hence the structure
is defined by relations
among prperties.
vs. XML
• Order of elements matters a
lot in XML
• Since XML has a tree
based data model, the
entity always starts with the
root element and goes on to
the child elements in an
orderly manner.
03/02/10
6
 RDF vs.
• RDF allows us to actually
extract the meaning of a
data.
• Consider an example of a
text to speech engine
where the program
actually reads the text with
emotions e.g. with
stresses on the keywords,
even though the scope of
understood data is limited.
XML
• XML only queries data
without any emphasis on
the meaning.
• Considering the same
example of a text to speech
engine, the program, as in
case with e.g. Microsoft
only reads the written data
without any clear emphasis
on the associated emotion,
with unlimited data scope.
03/02/10
7
 RDF
• There is a XML notation
for RDF but this is one of
many notations that share
a common data model.
• The data model is crucially
not a tree, but roughly a
graph. The data model
also makes particular use
of URIs and other things
which XML is agnostic to.
Thus the tools that work
on top of RDF work on top
of a graph data model, not
a tree data model.
vs. XML
• the name XML means two
things.
• First is the notation.
• Secondly there is the data
model behind that: a tree
with several types of nodes
(elements, attributes, etc.).
The data model is clear
when you think about XML
APIs and libraries.
03/02/10
8
 RDF vs. XML
• Consider a simple • this information be typically
example : The author of a be represented in XML as :
page is Ora.
<author>
• In RDF this is a triple
<uri>page</uri>
triple(author, page, Ora)
<name>Ora</name>
</author>

• Or Maybe :
<document href="page">
<author>Ora</author>
</document>

03/02/10
9
 RDF
• Since the schema is limited and
defined, the RDF graph, though
parsed in any way will only yield
one sequence.
• Like in the above example :
The understood graph will always
be :
vs. XML
• These are all perfectly good
XML documents - and to a
person reading then they
mean the same thing. To a
machine parsing them, they
produce different XML trees.
• The tree in this case may be
as that of the RDF graph, yet
it may not be, so the queries
must always be choice
independent, hence reducing
the flexibility.
03/02/10
10
 Using RDF instead of XML
• RDF allows us to parse the semantic tree, which end up
giving us a set of (possibly mutually referential) triples and
then we can use the ones you want ignoring the ones you
don't understand.
• Consider a layman example :
A label on a food product reads that it expires on December 2010. The
possible solutions using XML are that either the label or the product expires.
But using RDF, the associated schema properties produce only one result –
the espiry of the food product mentioned on a label.

• XML allows us to create schemas for refined queries, but

using RDF is both easier and more efficient.
03/02/10
11
 Conclusion
• Sometimes it seems there is a set of people for whom the
semantic web is the only graph which they would consider,
and another for whom the document tree (or graph if you
include links) is all they would consider. But it is important to
recognize the difference.
• While using RDF is easier that XML, yet developers prefer the
order in XML, which is mostly due to the constraints of
processing the human readable documents

03/02/10
12