The Resource Description Framework is slowly becoming a new standard for data interchange – among its key features there are certainly the simplicity of its model, but yet a powerful mechanism for encoding knowledge at any level of abstraction/complexity. Some of its most famous applications include:

  • RDF Site Summary – one of several “RSS” languages for publishing information about updates made to a web page; it is often used for disseminating news article summaries and sharing weblog content.
  • FOAF (Friend of a Friend) – designed to describe people, their interests and interconnections.
  • DOAC (Description of a Career) – supplements FOAF to allow the sharing of résumé information.
  • DOAP (Description of a Project) – designed to describe software projects; uses FOAF to identify the people involved
  • SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) – designed to describe online communities and to create connections between Internet-based discussions from message boards, weblogs and mailing lists. 
  • MusicBrainz – Publishes information about Music Albums. 
  • Creative Commons – Uses RDF to embed license information in web pages and mp3 files.

Being a fundamental issue for Cohere the import/export of data, we very soon decided to provide support for the RDF format as well. Here’s some of the services we plan to make available: 

  • extending the APIs for exporting RDF’ized Cohere data
  • let users import large quantities of data formatted using the RDF Cohere schema
  • import/export of AIF-RDF data

So, for the moment, we formalized the Cohere data model using OWL – this is the schema you will have to use so to be able to import your files. The Cohere ontology can be accessed at http://cohereweb.net/ontology/cohere.owl. Open it with ProtegeGrowl or your preferred ontology editor. There is also some documentation available here. And for all the rest, stay tuned!