RDF
From Friend2Friend Wiki
RDF, (Resource Description Framework) is the basic building block of all of W3C's efforts towards the semantic web. 5 Years after an initial recommendation, a 2004 revision was issued, which is now widely implemented, and has proved robust enough to support several more layers of higher order logic.
However, RDF is still not very widely utilised, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are programmers' unfamiliarity with the concept. Also, lack of tools, and a network effect have meant very low returns on the effort input to be an RDF early adopter. However, no serious alternatives have emerged and RDF does seem to be gathering steam at last.
Relationship to F2F
Although it uses a few attributes from the rdf namespace, F2F core is built on XML, not RDF. This has a proven schema language, XSD which is essential to checking programs correctness. Moreover, RDF is unnecessarily verbose and XML offers greater flexibility.
The base of namespaced XML, and range of XSLT processing options mean that F2F is well suited to crafting RDF. However, the verbosity and flexibility of general RDF is not suitable for consumption by XSLT.
One option would be to require a strictly limited format, a kind of canonicalised RDF. Various RDF toolkits for XSLT are available, but none are very satisfactory.
An alternative approach to facilitate consumption of general RDF would be to skinning available RDF processing libraries to create some RDF core services.
