and RDFa. RDF is a fundamental standard of the Semantic Web. RDF Schema extends RDF and is a vocabulary for describing properties and classes of RDF-based resources, with semantics for generalized-hierarchies of such properties and classes. OWL adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g. "exactly one"), equality, richer typing of properties, characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry), and enumerated classes. SPARQL is a protocol and query language for semantic web data sources. RIF is the W3C Rule Interchange Format. It's an XML language for expressing Web rules that computers can execute. RIF provides multiple versions, called dialects. It includes a RIF Basic Logic Dialect (RIF-BLD) and RIF Production Rules Dialect (RIF PRD). Current state of standardization Well-established standards: RDF RDFS Rule Interchange Format (RIF) SPARQL Unicode Uniform Resource Identifier Web Ontology Language (OWL) XML Not yet fully realized: Unifying Logic and Proof layers Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) Applications The intent is to enhance the usability and usefulness of the Web and its interconnected resources by creating semantic web services, such as: Servers that expose existing data systems using the RDF and SPARQL standards. Many converters to RDF exist from different applications. Relational databases are an important source. The semantic web server attaches to the existing system without affecting its operation. Documents "marked up" with semantic information (an extension of the HTML tags used in today's Web pages to supply information for Web search engines using web crawlers). This could be machine-understandable information about the human-understandable content of the document (such as the creator, title, description, etc.) or it could be purely metadata representing a set of facts (such as resources and services elsewhere on the site). Note that anything that can be identified with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) can be described, so the semantic web can reason about animals, people, places, ideas, etc. There are four semantic annotation formats that can be used in HTML documents; Microformat, RDFa, Microdata and JSON-LD. Semantic markup is often generated automatically, rather than manually. Common metadata vocabularies (ontologies) and maps between vocabularies that allow document creators to know how to mark up their documents so that agents can use the information in the supplied metadata (so that Author in the sense of 'the Author of the page' will not be confused with Author in the sense of a book that is the subject