Turtle (syntax)
| Filename extension | .ttl |
|---|---|
| Internet media type | text/turtle |
| Developed by | Dave Beckett |
| Type of format | Semantic Web |
| Container for | RDF data |
| Extended from | N-Triples |
| Standard | Specification |
Turtle (Terse RDF Triple Language) is a format for expressing data in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) data model with a syntax similar to SPARQL. RDF, in turn, represents information using "triples", each of which consists of a subject, a predicate, and an object. Each of those items is expressed as a Web URI.
Turtle provides a way to group three URIs to make a triple, and provides ways to abbreviate such information, for example by factoring out common portions of URIs. For example:
Turtle was defined by Dave Beckett as a subset of Tim Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly's Notation3 (N3) language, and a superset of the minimal N-Triples format. Unlike full N3, which has an expressive power that goes much beyond RDF, Turtle can only serialize valid RDF graphs. Turtle is an alternative to RDF/XML, the originally unique syntax and standard for writing RDF. As opposed to RDF/XML, Turtle does not rely on XML and is generally recognized as being more readable and easier to edit manually than its XML counterpart.
SPARQL, the query language for RDF, uses a syntax similar to Turtle for expressing query patterns.
In 2011, a working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) started working on an updated version of RDF, with the intention of publishing it along with a standardised version of Turtle. This Turtle specification was published as a W3C recommendation on 25 February 2014.
A significant proportion of RDF toolkits include Turtle parsing and serializing capability. Some examples of such toolkits are Redland, Sesame, Jena and RDFLib.
The following example defines 3 prefixes ("rdf", "dc", and "ex"), and uses them in expressing a statement about the editorship of the RDF/XML document:
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