Motivation
RDF is a World Wide Web Consortium proposal
Everything on the web is machine-readable but not machine-understandable
- The content of web pages is for human consumption only
- Example: doing a search and getting back a lot of extraneous hits
- Search engines use dumb brute-force robots
It is very hard to automate anything on the web and it is impossible to manage it manually
- It is impossible for one directory to categorize all web pages
- Yahoo tries to do this
The solution proposed by RDF is to use metadata to describe the data contained on the web