Turtle

Turtle (Terse RDF Triple Language) is a human-readable RDF serialization format that prioritizes simplicity and ease of use. It was designed by Dave Beckett in the early 2000s and became a W3C standard in 2014. It was designed to improve readability compared to RDF/XML and simplify manual RDF creation and editing. It is still maintained by the W3C, and it’s widely supported by RDF tools, as well as compatible with SPARQL (the RDF query language).

Turtle is based on the serialization format N-Triples, but extends it with additional syntax features like prefixes. The use of prefixes is one of Turtle’s strengths, because it helps create concise and readable data representations in which the namespaces can be declared once and don’t have to be repeated in each statement.

Turtle is a preferred serialization for RDF data.

© DANS. R.5.5.T.17.P.3 Version 1.0, December 13, 2024