This tutorial was given at SemTech 2008, on May 19th. From the program: "RDF is a key W3C specification and a foundational component of the Semantic Web. This tutorial will explain the basics of RDF and how it functions as a key building block of semantic systems. Mark Birbeck is the managing director of webBackplane. He has been creating software for many years, and his particular interests are the semantic web, and components that help to create dynamic, flexible, user interfaces. He has consulted, given training, spoken at conferences and contributed to books and articles on these and other topics. He is also heavily involved in the creation of new standards on these themes. Mark is an Invited Expert on both the XForms Working Group and the XHTML 2 Working Group, at the W3C. Over the years his work there has included devising and proposing RDFa."

1. Introduction to RDF and RDFS Mark Birbeck http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck

2. RDF...a four letter word

3. RDF/XML is the real villain

4. The promise of XML

7. Metadata: data about data

8. Getting data from the web is easy...getting metadata is hard

10. XML was supposed to give us this information

12. Why has XML not delivered?

14. We want to say: "give me everything created by J. S. Bach"

15. To achieve that we need to agree how to say ' created by ' in any document

16. Dublin, Ohio Photo by Sleestak66: http://www.flickr.com/people/kesselring/

18. DC.Creator = "J. S. Bach"

19. DC.Title = "The Well Tempered Clavier"

27. Unique identifiers are a key concept in RDF

28. DC.Creator DC.Title

29. http://purl.org/dc/terms/ creator http://purl.org/dc/terms/ title

30. Resource Description Framework

31. http://purl.org/dc/terms/ creator http://purl.org/dc/terms/ title

36. Triples

41. The parts of a triple

42. Subject A URI: http://dbpedia.org/resource/Johann_Sebastian_Bach

48. XML literals "H₂O"^^rdf:XMLLiteral

53. Graphs

54. The Well Tempered Clavier Wohltemperiertes Klavie dc:title dc:title 1685-03-21 1750-07-28 p:dateOfBirth p:dateOfDeath dc:creator

55. rdf:type

56. <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Johann_Sebastian_Bach> rdf:type yago:Composer . <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Johann_Sebastian_Bach> rdf:type foaf:Person .

57. Lists

58. Performed by Performed by dc:creator Performed by dc:creator rdf:Bag rdf:type

59. Blank nodes

60. Representing RDF

61. RDF/XML <rdf:RDF> <yago:Composer109947232 rdf:about=&quot;http://[...]/Johann_Sebastian_Bach&quot; > <p:birthPlace rdf:resource=&quot;http://[...]/Eisenach&quot; /> <p:dateOfDeath rdf:datatype=&quot;http://[...]/XMLSchema#date&quot; >1750-07-28</p:dateOfDeath> </yago:Composer109947232> </rdf:RDF>

62. Turtle dbpedia:Johann_Sebastian_Bach p:dateOfBirth &quot;1685-03-21&quot;^^xsd:date; p:dateOfDeath &quot;1750-07-28&quot;^^xsd:date; p:death &quot;1750-07-28&quot;^^xsd:date; p:deathPlace dbpedia:Leipzig; a yago:Composer, foaf:Person .

65. Storing RDF

66. Sources of RDF

67. Querying RDF

71. Creating vocabularies

72. Classes

73. Composer Musician Is a type of Artist Is a type of Creator Is a type of

79. Properties

83. Validation v. inference

87. OWL

88. Conclusion