Simplifying RDFa Notation

esource Description Framework (RDF) is not the world's most beloved standard. That it is used most often in fairly obscure applications for handling such fundamental concepts as meaning, topicality, and the definition of objects that sound more like philosophy than computer science certainly doesn't help its case. That its use cases generally involve creating both interconnections and abstractions—operations that make most people's eyes glaze over—within external resources (it is the "resource description framework," after all) may have something to do with it too.

Perhaps the biggest problem that RDF faces is those pesky namespaces. The idea is reasonably sound—a term in a vocabulary has meaning only in the context of a given namespace. This idea may seem counterintuitive to the average Joe, but from a computer technology standpoint it makes a lot of sense. A computer has no concept of meaning, unless that meaning is made explicit for it by some formal definition (also known as a binding), with the term in the vocabulary consequently either identifying a given resource or invoking a certain behavior. In a nutshell, creating definitions is what writing programs is all about.