I've used RDF and SPARQL for a couple of years so I have some thoughts on it. The problem with using it is that while there are standards for it, there are too many standards and they often aren't followed. If the structure of the data has to be inferred and metadata is missing, then there is no way to figure out the structure. Our product was meant to be able to communicate with internal tools as well as external ones because it used RDF. What we ended up doing was hard coding assumptions about the internal tools because certain pieces of information weren't available in the RDF.
The goal of RDF and the semantic web was to make things easy, but after using it, it makes things much more complicated.
Finally, on the topic of encoding. The old defacto standard of encoding RDF was XML. More recently, Turtle[1] has become more popular, and that really helps the human readability of RDF by an order of magnitude.
The goal of RDF and the semantic web was to make things easy, but after using it, it makes things much more complicated.
Finally, on the topic of encoding. The old defacto standard of encoding RDF was XML. More recently, Turtle[1] has become more popular, and that really helps the human readability of RDF by an order of magnitude.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/turtle/