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What is Resource Description Framework and Linked Data?

If you’ve come this far, it’s probably because you’re wondering what all the talk about RDF (Resource Description Framework) is really about.

What is RDF?

So what exactly is RDF? Loosely translated, Resource Description Framework means something like framework for describing resources, and this basically explains RDF:

  • A resource can be anything, including documents, web pages, people, physical objects, and abstract concepts and ideas.
  • With RDF, you describe the resources and the relationships between them.
  • RDF is a framework because
    • it is a formal and logical language,
    • it is a model for structuring data, and
    • it includes tools and algorithms for processing the data.

So with RDF, you can describe things and how these things relate to each other. Since RDF is based on web technology, you can link your descriptions to others’, and we then talk about linked data.

Why RDF?

There are several reasons why we use RDF in the descriptions published to data.norge.no. RDF has some advantages that make it well-suited for a data catalog. Some of these are:

  1. Interoperability:

    • a. RDF has a global namespace, which means we can talk about the same things across systems.
    • b. Different descriptions (such as datasets and concepts) can be more easily connected (linked data).
    • c. RDF makes it easy to reuse vocabularies and information across systems and solutions.

  2. RDF is machine-readable and can be exchanged and understood by various data systems.

  3. Semantics come with the data when using classes and properties defined in RDF; the data becomes self-explanatory.

  4. RDF can handle complex data that is difficult to define in table form.

  5. RDF enables distributed queries.

  6. A large toolbox is available (for modeling, validation, queries, distributed data, and more).

Tip: Check out what W3C writes about RDF use cases.

Data.norge.no retrieves descriptions from many different organizations, so it’s beneficial that we use a machine-readable and standardized format like RDF.

The European data portal data.europa.eu is based on RDF and retrieves descriptions from, among others, data.norge.no. This means that data.norge.no must offer it in RDF.

All descriptions of data catalogs for both data.norge.no and data.europa.eu follow a standard called DCAT (Data Catalog Vocabulary) which is defined in RDF.

More Information about RDF

If you want to learn more about how RDF works, you can take a look at our crash course.