Web and XML Glossary

RDF is designed to provide an infrastructure supporting Meta Data across many WWW-based activities. RDF is the result of a number of Meta Data communities bringing together their needs to provide a robust and flexible architecture for supporting Meta Data on the Internet and the WWW. Example applications include site maps, content ratings, stream channel definitions, search engine data collection, digital library collections, and distributed authoring. RDF allows different application communities to define the Meta Data property set that best serves the needs of each community. RDF provides a uniform and interoperable means to exchange the Meta Data between programs and across the WWW. Furthermore, RDF provides a means for publishing both a human-readable and a machine-understandable definition of the property set itself. RDF uses XML as the transfer syntax in order to leverage other tools and code bases being built around XML.