Editing Resource Description Framework (section)

=== Example 3: A Wikipedia article about Tony Benn ===
In a like manner, given that <nowiki>"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Benn"</nowiki> identifies a particular resource (regardless of whether that URI could be traversed as a hyperlink, or whether the resource is ''actually'' the [[Wikipedia]] article about [[Tony Benn]]), to say that the title of this resource is "Tony Benn" and its publisher is "Wikipedia" would be two assertions that could be expressed as valid RDF statements. In the N-Triples form of RDF, these statements might look like the following:

<syntaxhighlight lang="turtle">
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Benn> <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title> "Tony Benn" .
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Benn> <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/publisher> "Wikipedia" .
</syntaxhighlight>

To an English-speaking person, the same information could be represented simply as:
<blockquote>The title of this resource, which is published by Wikipedia, is 'Tony Benn'</blockquote>
However, RDF puts the information in a formal way that a machine can understand. The purpose of RDF is to provide an [[Semantics encoding|encoding]] and interpretation mechanism so that [[Resource (computer science)|resources]] can be described in a way that particular [[software]] can understand it; in other words, so that software can access and use information that it otherwise could not use.

Both versions of the statements above are wordy because one requirement for an RDF resource (as a subject or a predicate) is that it be unique. The subject resource must be unique in an attempt to pinpoint the exact resource being described. The predicate needs to be unique in order to reduce the chance that the idea of [[Title]] or [[Publisher]] will be ambiguous to software working with the description. If the software recognizes  ''<nowiki>http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title</nowiki>'' (a specific [[definition]] for the [[concept]] of a title established by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative), it will also know that this title is different from a land title or an honorary title or just the letters t-i-t-l-e put together.

The following example, written in Turtle, shows how such simple claims can be elaborated on, by combining multiple RDF vocabularies. Here, we note that the primary topic of the Wikipedia page is a "Person" whose name is "Tony Benn":

<syntaxhighlight lang="turtle">
@prefix rdf:  <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
@prefix dc:   <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Benn>
    dc:publisher "Wikipedia" ;
    dc:title "Tony Benn" ;
    foaf:primaryTopic [
        a foaf:Person ;
        foaf:name "Tony Benn"
    ] .
</syntaxhighlight>