I still like my analogy to the elephant and the blind men, in chapter 1. People still see RDF, and more generally, the Semantic Web (or my preferred, the lowercase semantic web), from different viewpoints, and with different expectations. That hasn’t changed, and by the nature of the beast, never will.
Good. Keeps life interesting.
The W3C RDF working group has issued new and revised versions of the RDF specifications. This doesn’t impact on Chapter 1 that much, but will in the other chapters, and where differences in the writing as compared to the specifications arise, I will make a note.
One change in the book is that any reference to the URI yasd.com has no relevance to anything actually existing. I dropped this domain when it was so badly overrun with email spam, it was no longer usable. As for the URLs in the chapter, those related to the specifications are:
RDF/XML Syntax Specification (revised)
RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema
Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Syntax
The graphic depicting the differences between RDF/XML and XML by Semaview no longer exists; sorry about that. However, I do believe my textual description does a decent job of explaining the difference. Comments, though, are welcome on this.
Page 8 references the ‘new’ ontology language work. Well, this group released specifications the same time as the final specifications were released for RDF, and can still be found here.
As for the rest of the chapter, most of the material in chapter 1 is more of a introduction for the rest of the book, so I’ll be updating the material as we come to it in the other chapters.