What is RDF?
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) (https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-concepts/) is a technology standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for formulating logical statements about resources. These statements are made in triples of subject, predicate, and object. E.g.: a product class (subject) is described by (predicate) a property (object). Such a set of triples can be retrieved in different serializations as a file or via services or queried with further query languages matching this technology (e.g. SPARQL). RDF also forms the basic technology for Knowledge Graphs.
Goals
In addition to the existing approaches and solutions, the goal is to map the ECLASS Standard in this form and to enable product descriptions in triples in order to prepare ECLASS for use in Knowledge Graph, among other things. Other use cases include embedding in W3C Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description (TD) (https://www.w3.org/TR/wot-thing-description11/).
With an RDF representation of ECLASS as well as product descriptions, general topics such as the validation of product descriptions using SHACL (https://www.w3.org/TR/shacl/) and queries of data or the model can be implemented using SPARQL (https://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-overview/) in addition to fundamentally individual business cases.
Next steps
The project to derive ECLASS in RDF is becoming more and more concrete. After many concepts and support by external service providers, the CRD ad hoc group on RDF specification has submitted and presented a corresponding draft to the ECLASS CRD. A decision on this is pending. The draft can be requested from the ECLASS Head Office.
Among others, BCON² GmbH is also working on this RDF serialization. Also an online Tripple-Store as Fuseki test-server is available for experiments.
