Currently under development within the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C, the Resource Description Framework or RDF provides a framework for metadata in different application areas, e.g. resource discovery, content ratings, and intellectual property. RDF is essentially a data model expressed by one or more syntaxes that make the structure of resource descriptions explicit.

"The basic language for writing metadata; a foundation which provides a robust flexible architecture for processing metadata on the Internet. RDF will retain the capability to exchange metadata between application communities, while allowing each community to define and use the metadata that best serves their needs" Dublin Core Metadata Glossary, Final Draft, Feb. 24, 2001, Online. Available at http://library.csun.edu/mwoodley/dublincoreglossary.html

An application of XML that enables the creation of rich structured Internet resource descriptions.

RDF, or Research Description Framework, is a means of structuring metadata and describing relationships between resources, generally via XML namespaces. A resource can be any discrete item – a web page, .pdf file, media file, etc. A resource such as a web page might have particular properties defined such as "title," "content," "creator," etc. Properties are non-hierarchical and the more properties that are defined, the better that search interfaces are able to sort through large numbers of resources. Relationships between resources can be made explicit through the defining of properties. For example, the resource "The Last Man" might be linked to the resource "Mary Shelley" via the property "author of." (more…) Glossary

Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata model but which has come to be used as a general method of modeling knowledge, through a variety of syntax formats.