| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Metamodel | rdfs |
| Specification | RDF Schema 1.1 |
| Status | W3C Recommendation |
| Date | 25 February 2014 |
| URL | https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/ |
| Editors | Dan Brickley, R.V. Guha |
| Namespace IRI | http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema# |
| Prefix | rdfs: |
| Package | @amlhubs/rdfs@0.0.1 |
| Upstream | @amlhubs/rdf (peerDependency) |
| Repository | https://github.com/amlhubs/rdfs |
| License | UNLICENSED (proprietary) |
@amlhubs/rdfs is a TypeScript metamodel implementation of RDF Schema 1.1, the W3C Recommendation that layers a vocabulary-description language on top of RDF. Where RDF supplies the universal triple primitive — subject, predicate, object expressed as IRIs and literals — RDFS supplies the schema layer that gives those triples meaning at the class and property level: it lets a publisher say that two classes stand in a subclass relationship, that a property is a refinement of another, and that any subject of a given property must be an instance of a particular class. The package exposes the six RDFS classes (rdfs:Resource, rdfs:Class, rdfs:Literal, rdfs:Datatype, rdfs:Container, rdfs:ContainerMembershipProperty) and the nine core RDFS properties (rdfs:subClassOf, rdfs:subPropertyOf, rdfs:domain, rdfs:range, rdfs:label, rdfs:comment, rdfs:seeAlso, rdfs:isDefinedBy, rdfs:member) as extensible base classes and interfaces — pure RDFS, peer-dependent on @amlhubs/rdf for the underlying IRI / Literal / Triple primitives.
Vocabulary publishing. RDFS is the smallest sufficient instrument for publishing a controlled vocabulary on the open web. Any agent — human author, ageni runtime, third-party tool — that needs to declare "Person is a subclass of Agent", "homepage has a Person in its domain and a Document in its range", or "the preferred label of this concept is 'Customer'" can do so in pure RDFS with zero ontology-language overhead. A first-class TypeScript surface lowers the activation cost of authoring such vocabularies inside the amlhubs and ageni ecosystems and lets agents emit conformant RDFS straight from typed APIs.
Foundation for OWL and SKOS. Both OWL 2 (the W3C ontology language) and SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) are explicitly defined as extensions of RDFS — every OWL class is an rdfs:Class, every OWL property is an rdf:Property constrained by RDFS domain/range, every SKOS concept is annotated with rdfs:label and organized via skos:broader/skos:narrower that themselves echo rdfs:subClassOf semantics. Implementing RDFS as its own clean metamodel package is therefore a precondition for shipping conformant @amlhubs/owl and @amlhubs/skos packages downstream — the entire Semantic Web stack rests on it.
Agentic runtime leverage. The ageni runtime reasons over typed graphs: agents query "what subclasses inherit this property?", "what is the most specific class that admits this resource?", "what are the human-readable labels for this concept in the user's locale?". RDFS encodes exactly those queries as a tiny, decidable inference closure (six entailment rules in §7 of RDF 1.1 Semantics). Surfacing those rules through a typed TypeScript API turns RDFS into a directly-callable reasoning primitive for agents, with none of the closure-cost amplification of full OWL 2 DL.
Downstream reuse. Beyond OWL and SKOS, RDFS is consumed by dcterms, foaf, schema.org (JSON-LD context), prov-o, void, dcat, and dozens of other widely-deployed vocabularies. Every one of those vocabularies emits triples whose predicates are rdfs:subClassOf, rdfs:domain, rdfs:range, rdfs:label, rdfs:comment. A correct, well-typed @amlhubs/rdfs is therefore a force-multiplier — every downstream package the amlhubs org publishes that touches a registered vocabulary can import this metamodel and be guaranteed structural conformance with the W3C Recommendation.
| Concern | Source | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| RDFS classes | https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/ §2, §5 | rdfs:Resource, rdfs:Class, rdfs:Literal, rdfs:Datatype, rdfs:Container, rdfs:ContainerMembershipProperty |
| RDFS properties | https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/ §3, §5 | rdfs:subClassOf, rdfs:subPropertyOf, rdfs:domain, rdfs:range, rdfs:label, rdfs:comment, rdfs:seeAlso, rdfs:isDefinedBy, rdfs:member |
| Vocabulary serialization | https://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema | RDF/XML and Turtle namespace documents |
| Semantic closure | RDF 1.1 Semantics — W3C Rec 2014-02-25 | RDFS entailment rules (rdfs1–rdfs13) |
| Underlying triple model | @amlhubs/rdf (peerDependency) |
IRI, BlankNode, Literal, Triple, Graph |
| Out of scope | — | OWL 2 axioms, SKOS concept schemes, SHACL constraints — these belong to dedicated downstream packages |
- RDF Schema 1.1 — https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/
- RDF 1.1 Semantics — https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-mt/
- RDF 1.1 Primer — https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-primer/
- RDFS namespace document — https://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema
- RDF namespace document — https://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns