A library environment is very similar to the World Wide Web, with the only difference that the web is very big and diverse, and therefore the lack of a single format cause even more difficulties for searching. How can metadata be successfully used for web searches? In his article "What is RDF?" Tim Bray says "if libraries, which have existed for hundreds of years, can't agree on a single standard, there's not much chance that the Web will." However, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) was developed with an idea to achieve that goal by describing and interchanging metadata on the Internet.
The RDF structure is based on the three main concepts: a resource, a property, and a statement. A resource is any web page that can be identified with the URI. A property is a resource with a name, such as Title. A statement is a resource, a property, and a value, such as "A Title of http://www.geocities.com/potterica/ is The UHPFC's Encyclopedia Potterica
These are the features of RDF:
Independence: anyone can create properties
Interchange: any RDF file can be converted to XML
Scalability: RDF's are simple three-part records
Properties, Values, and Statements can be resources and include metadata created by other people and organizations
The main advantage of RDF over the basic XML is its simplicity. Unlike the order of elements in XML, the order of RDF properties does not matter. RDF offers a very appealing and flexible solution to any web designer.