resource description framework (RDF)

A Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a data model for metadata. It has been defined as:

A general framework for describing a Web site's metadata. RDF is based on XML and provides interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information on the Web. Resource Description Framework data consists of resources (nodes), and property/value pairs describing the resource. A node is any object which can be pointed to by a URI, properties are attributes of the node, and values can be either atomic values for the attribute, or other nodes. For example, information about a particular web page (a node), might include the property "Author". The value for the Author property could be either a string giving the name of the author, or a link to a resource describing the author. Resource Description Framework only specifies a mechanism for encoding and transferring meta-data. It does not specify what that meta-data should, or can be.