Pattern - RDF Configuration File

Features

• RDF is used as the representation of declarative information about a configuration
• This can be used for Preflight validation of a deployment, and to drive the deployment itself.
• Different tools may read/write the RDF.

Advantages

• RDF is strongly tool-neutral; many different tools can process the information.
• AI processing techniques (inference, etc.) can be used to work with the information.
• RDF can represent complex graph structures in a standard form, whereas in XML formats, every tool has to invent their own way to cross-reference other parts of the graph.
• Can merge the RDF with information from other RDF sources.

Disadvantages

• RDF is only weakly human readable/writeable, especially in its XML form. The R3 notation is superior here.
• Resolution is harder in RDF than in other AI knowledge representation syntaxes, because of the assumption that if a fact does not resolve, that does not imply it is true (the closed world assumption that Prolog operates under).

SmartFrog support

SmartFrog is not an RDF language. Our colleagues in HP Laboratories who work on the Jena Semantic Web Framework provide an RDF engine.