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.

W3C maintain the RDFS (RDF vocabulary description language; Brickley and McBride 2004) and SKOS (simple knowledge organization system; W3C 2009) as tools for maintaining a vocabulary of terms.

Principles of Good Practice (see W3C Wiki, 2005)

• Identify Terms with URIs.
• Articulate and publish maintenance policies for the Terms and their URIs.
• Identify the historical version of a Vocabulary or its Terms.
• Provide natural-language documentation about the Terms.
• Declare the Terms using a formal, machine-processable schema language.

Principles of Good Practice (see W3C, 2008)

• Use URIs For Naming [1]
• Provide Readable Documentation [2]
• Articulate Maintenance Policies [3]
• Identify Versions [4]
• Publish a Formal Schema [5]

Links

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

References

• 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

• Brickley D, Guha RV, McBride B (2004). RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema. W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004. Available at http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-schema-20040210/

• Miles A and Bechhofer S (2009) SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System: Reference. W3C Recommendation 18 August 2009. Available at http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference