Abstract

The original RDFS language design includes several features that hinder the task of developers and theoreticians. This paper has two main contributions in the direction of simplifying the language. First, it introduces a small fragment which, preserving the normative semantics and the core functionalities, avoids the complexities of the original specification, and captures the main semantic functionalities of RDFS. Second, it introduces a minimalist deduction system over this fragment, which by avoiding certain rare cases, obtains a simple deductive system and a computationally efficient entailment checking. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.