Chapter 9 - Using RDFS-Plus in the wild

Abstract

This chapter describes two example uses of the RDFS-Plus constructs. Both of these applications of RDFS-Plus make essential use of the constructs in RDFS-Plus, though often in quite different ways. These are real modeling applications built by groups who originally had no technology commitment to RDFS or OWL (though both were conceived as RDF applications). In both cases, the projects are about setting up an infrastructure for a particular Web community. The use of RDFS-Plus appears in the models that describe data in these communities, rather than in the everyday use in these communities. This chapter describes how modeling works in RDFS and OWL; hence the focus is on the community infrastructure of these projects. The first application is part of a major US government effort called Data.gov. Data.gov is an effort made by the US government to publish public information. There are hundreds of thousands of datasets in Data.gov, of which hundreds are made available in RDF, with many more being converted all the time. Data.gov is a great example of the data wilderness; the published data sets come from a wide variety of source formats and collection methodologies, resulting in idiosyncratic data representations. The second application is called FOAF, for “Friend of a Friend.” FOAF is a project dedicated to creating and using machine-readable homepages that describe people, the links between them, and the things they create and do. FOAF was originally based on RDF because of the inherently distributed and Web-like nature of the project requirements. As the project evolved, there was a need to describe the relationships between various resources in a formal way; this led it to RDFS and then on to RDFS-Plus. The chapter describes each of these efforts and shows their use of the RDFS-Plus.