Notation3, or N3 as it is more commonly known, is a shorthand non-XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 serialization of Resource Description Framework

Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...

 models, designed with human-readability in mind: N3 is much more compact and readable than XML RDF notation. The format is being developed by Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...

 and others from the Semantic Web

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...

 community.

N3 has several features that go beyond a serialization for RDF models, such as support for RDF-based rules. Turtle

Turtle (syntax)

Turtle is a serialization format for Resource Description Framework graphs. A subset of Tim Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly's Notation3 language, it was defined by Dave Beckett, and is a superset of the minimal N-Triples format. Unlike full N3, Turtle doesn't go beyond RDF's graph model...

 is a simplified, RDF-only subset of N3.

Examples

This RDF model in standard XML notation


xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">

Tony Benn
Wikipedia




may be written in Notation 3 like this:

@prefix dc: .





  dc:title "Tony Benn";

  dc:publisher "Wikipedia".

(This example would also be valid Turtle

Turtle (syntax)

Turtle is a serialization format for Resource Description Framework graphs. A subset of Tim Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly's Notation3 language, it was defined by Dave Beckett, and is a superset of the minimal N-Triples format. Unlike full N3, Turtle doesn't go beyond RDF's graph model...

.)

External links

• Notation 3 W3C Submission
• Notation 3 Outline on W3C Design Issues by Tim Berners-Lee
• Notation 3 Primer: Getting into RDF & Semantic Web using N3
• A Rough Guide to Notation3
• RDF for "Little Languages"
• An editing mode of N3 for Emacs
• An editing mode of N3 for vim
• An editing mode of N3 for textmate

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.