RDF

RDF, or Resource Description Framework, was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium as the fundamental building block of the semantic web. It takes the form subject – predicate – object. This form is called a RDF triple. A graphical example would be:

where John is the subject, likes is the predicate, and Cake is the object. The subject, predicate, and object are all URIs (uniform resource identifiers). A URI is like a URL, except that it does not have to be retrivable from the web. Liyang Yu, in his book, “A Developer's Guide to the Semantic Web” goes into this further.

A collection of these RDF triples will form an RDF graph, which can be used to model the Network Visualization examples.