[jraph]

Resource Description Framework [1] is basically a way to describes resources with (subject, verb, object) predicates, where subject is the resource being described and object is another resource related to the subject in a way verb defines (verb is not necessarily a grammatical verb/action, it's often a property name).

There are several formats to represent these predicates (Turtle), database implementations, query languages (SPARQL), and there are ontologies, which are schemas, basically, defining/describing what how to describe resource in some domain.

It's highly related to the semantic web vision of the early 2000s.

If you don't know about it, it is worth taking a few minutes to study it. It sometimes surfaces and it's nice to understand what's going on, it can give good design ideas, and it's an important piece of computer history.

It's also the quiet basis for many things, OpenGraph [3] metadata tags in HTML documents are basically RDF for instance. (TIL about RDFa [4] btw, I had always seen these meta tags as very RDF-like, for a good reason indeed).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

[3] https://ogp.me/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa

[pbronez]

Also worth checking out schema.org, which provides a baseline ontology that pops up in many places

https://schema.org/Thing

[rapnie]

Does OpenGraph gain any benefit from its definition as linked data? Or might it just as well have been defined as, say, JSON Schema's and referring to those property names in html?

[jraph]

I'm not expert on OpenGraph, and it's been a while I've actually manipulated RDF other than the automatically generated og meta tags.

I'd say defining this as linked data was quite idiomatic / elegant. It's possibly mainly because OpenGraph was inspired of Dublin Core [1], which was RDF-based. They didn't reinvent everything with OpenGraph, but kept the spirit, I suppose.

In the end it's probably quite equivalent.

And in this end, why not both? Apparently we defined an RDF ontology for JSON schemas! [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core

[2] https://www.w3.org/2019/wot/json-schema

[retube]

Thanks vm for the detailed reply, most helpful!