Recipes for Publishing Vocabularies and Ontologies

Recognizing a need to answer questions about best practices for serving RDF and OWL vocabularies and namespace documents, the W3C Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group published a W3C Working Draft "Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies" (dated 14 March 2006). The W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group is tasked to update this Working Draft.

This draft document describes general principles that are in accord with the W3C Technical Architecture Group's positions on Web Architecture and the use of HTTP for describing "non-information resources" (resources that are not fundamentally documents). RDF Classes and properties are "non-information resources" per the TAG's terminology.

The "Best Practice Recipes" document provides several recipes addressing the most common cases: namespace documents that are only provided in RDF form and namespace documents provided in both RDF and HTML form, for RDF namespaces whose URIs use fragment identifiers ('#') as the Class and Property names and RDF namespaces whose URIs name Classes and Properties without the use of fragment identifiers (so-called "slash namespaces").

For purposes of illustration each recipe is described in detail showing the specific configuration directives that will make an apache 2 server operate as the recipe requires. ContentNegotiation lists some libraries that can assist with better content negotiation than is illustrated in the recipes.

Detailed configuration data for other HTTP servers may be added here.