W3C RDF Vocabulary Guidelines

W3C - Best Practices for managing RDF Vocabularies

The World Wide Web Consortium has developed best practice guidelines for publishing RDF vocabularies on the web. A vocabulary management task force (W3C, 2006a) was established in February 2004 (W3C, 2006b). The best practices for RDF vocabulary management was developed using a W3C wiki (W3C, 2005) and later two official W3C Guidelines was published (Miles et al, 2006; Kendall et al, 2008). Miles et al (2006) provides guidelines for choosing between a hash namespace and a slash namespace including configuration guidelines for the Apache web server. Kendall et al (2008) provides guidelines with more focus on development and maintenance of the RDF vocabulary resource itself.

Links:

• RDF validator: http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/

• W3C (2006a). Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group. Vocabulary Management Task Force (VM). Members: Thomas Baker, Dan Brickley, Libby Miller, Alistair Miles, Ralph Swick. Available at http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/VM/ (last updated 7 March 2006).

• W3C (2006b). Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment (SWBPD) Working Group Charter. Available at http://www.w3.org/2003/12/swa/swbpd-charter (last updated 20 April 2006).

• W3C (2005). Managing a Vocabulary for the Semantic Web -- Best Practice Wiki]. Available at http://www.w3.org/wiki/VocabManagementNote (last updated 4 Dec 2005).

• Miles A, Baker T, and Swick R (2006). Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies. W3C Working Draft 14 March 2006. W3C. Available at http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-swbp-vocab-pub-20060314/

• Kendall E, Baker T, and Miles A (2008). Principles of Good Practice for Managing RDF Vocabularies and OWL Ontologies. W3C Editor's Draft 16 March 2008. Available at http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/Vocab/principles