Turtle (syntax)
Encyclopedia
Turtle is a serialization format for Resource Description Framework
(RDF) graphs. A subset of Tim Berners-Lee
and Dan Connolly's Notation3 (N3) 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. SPARQL
uses a similar N3 subset to Turtle for its graph patterns, but using N3's brace syntax for delimiting subgraphs.
Turtle was accepted as a first working draft by the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) RDF Working Group on 9 August 2011.
Turtle is popular among Semantic Web
developers as a human-friendly alternative to RDF/XML
. A significant proportion of RDF toolkits include Turtle parsing and serializing capability. Some examples are Redland
, Sesame
, Jena
and RDFLib
.
@prefix rdf: .
@prefix dc:
@prefix ex:
dc:title "RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised)" ;
ex:editor [
ex:fullname "Dave Beckett";
ex:homePage
] .
(Turtle examples are also valid Notation3).
The MIME type of Turtle is
.
Resource Description Framework
The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...
(RDF) graphs. A subset of 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 Dan Connolly's Notation3 (N3) language, it was defined by Dave Beckett, and is a superset of the minimal N-Triples
N-Triples
N-Triples is a format for storing and transmitting data. It is a line-based, plain text serialisation format for RDF graphs, and a subset of the Turtle format. N-Triples should not be confused with Notation 3 which is a superset of Turtle...
format. Unlike full N3, Turtle doesn't go beyond RDF's graph model. SPARQL
SPARQL
SPARQL is an RDF query language; its name is an acronym that stands for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language. It was made a standard by the RDF Data Access Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium, and considered as one of the key technologies of semantic web...
uses a similar N3 subset to Turtle for its graph patterns, but using N3's brace syntax for delimiting subgraphs.
Turtle was accepted as a first working draft by the World Wide Web Consortium
World Wide Web Consortium
The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web .Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the...
(W3C) RDF Working Group on 9 August 2011.
Turtle is popular among 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...
developers as a human-friendly alternative to RDF/XML
RDF/XML
RDF/XML is a syntax, defined by the W3C, to express an RDF graph as an XML document. According to the W3C, "RDF/XML is the normative syntax for writing RDF"....
. A significant proportion of RDF toolkits include Turtle parsing and serializing capability. Some examples are Redland
Redland RDF Application Framework
Redland is a set of free software libraries written in C that provide support for the Resource Description Framework , created by Dave Beckett .The packages that form Redland are:...
, Sesame
Sesame (framework)
Sesame is an open-source framework for querying and analyzing RDF data. It was created, and is still being maintained, by the Dutch software company . It was originally developed as part of the "On-To-Knowledge", a semantic web project that ran from 1999 to 2002. It contains a triplestore.Sesame...
, Jena
Jena (framework)
Jena is an open source Semantic Web framework for Java. It provides an API to extract data from and write to RDF graphs. The graphs are represented as an abstract "model". A model can be sourced with data from files, databases, URLs or a combination of these...
and RDFLib
RDFLib
RDFLib is a Python library for working with RDF, a simple yet powerful language for representing information. The library contains an RDF/XML parser/serializer that conforms to the RDF/XML Syntax Specification . The library also contains both in-memory and persistent Graph backends...
.
Example
ex:editor [
ex:fullname "Dave Beckett";
] .
(Turtle examples are also valid Notation3).
The MIME type of Turtle is
text/turtle. The character encoding of Turtle content is always UTF-8UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
.