Blogmarks

RDF, Linked Data & WebID

Your knowledge is typed, interlinked, and self-describing

Triples are the smallest unit of machine-readable meaning. Your Pod is built from them.

What is RDF & Linked Data?

RDF (Resource Description Framework) is the W3C standard for describing resources as subject-predicate-object triples. Every fact is a triple: "this asset" "has the title" "…". Chains of triples form a knowledge graph that any machine can traverse without prior knowledge of the structure.

Linked Data principles extend RDF to the web: use URIs to name things, make those URIs dereferenceable, and link to other resources so that discovering one data point leads to more. A Blogmarks asset with a canonical URI can link to the author's FOAF profile, to related Schema.org types, to the original publisher's structured data.

WebID is the decentralized identity layer: a URI that identifies a person, resolvable to a profile document that describes their access permissions. Your identity is not issued by a platform — it is a URI you control, resolvable from any Solid Pod.

Why it matters

The web was built on documents. Documents are for humans. Triples are for machines. The difference is not pedantic — it determines whether your knowledge is queryable by a reasoning system or just searchable by full-text.

Every major data silo stores your information in a proprietary schema. The only machine that knows how to read it is the machine that wrote it. RDF is the counter-architecture: a universal grammar for facts that any triple-store, knowledge graph engine, or semantic reasoner can consume.

WebID means that access control is not managed by a platform's user account system — it is managed by you, via a cryptographic identity you own. Applications do not grant you access to your own data; they request access from you.

How Blogmarks uses this

Blogmarks defines its own RDF vocabulary in Turtle (Terse RDF Triple Language) for asset metadata. Each bookmarked asset is described with predicates for source URL, canonical URL, content type, extraction confidence, embedding model, and chunk count.

These triples are stored alongside the raw bytes and extracted Markdown in your Solid Pod. The metadata document is a first-class resource with its own URL. Any Linked Data client can fetch it and traverse its links without knowing anything about Blogmarks.

WebID governs who can access which Pod resources. Blogmarks authenticates against your Pod using your WebID credentials. When you revoke access, Blogmarks loses the ability to read or write — immediately, at the protocol level.

Further reading

  1. [1]
    W3C RDF Working Group. RDF 1.1 Primer. W3C, 2014(W3C Working Group Note)
  2. [2]
    Tom Heath, Christian Bizer. Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space. Morgan & Claypool, 2011
  3. [3]
    Jesús Barrasa, Jim Webber. Building Knowledge Graphs. O'Reilly Media, 2023

O'Reilly titles researched via O'Reilly for Learning.