RDF and its serializations

Graphs and Semantic Web graphs represent a continuum between simply representing data and indicating that there is some relationship among entities in the data set, and a formalized way of representing those entities and specifying those relationships. This chapter delves deeper into RDF and modeling information using RDF. It then introduces the notion of serializations. RDF is an abstract model, a general specification for modeling data for the Semantic Web. Serializations are the actual manifestation of RDF in a particular format, stored in a text file. We look at several serializations including Turtle, N-triples or Notation3 (N3), RDF/XML, the new Javascript object data format JSON-LD, and the microformat RDFa, which can be embedded into Web pages.