RDFi

RDFi is an informal term used in software development to describe an application programming interface or software layer that provides access to RDF data. It is not a formal standard, but it is commonly used in documentation and library design to refer to the components that manage and manipulate RDF graphs within an application.

RDFi typically covers the core capabilities needed to work with RDF data. This includes creating, reading, updating, and deleting triples, assembling and modifying graphs, and handling namespaces and prefixes. It often supports loading data from and serializing data to common RDF formats such as Turtle, RDF/XML, N-Triples, and JSON-LD. In addition, RDFi usually provides mechanisms for querying data through SPARQL, managing named graphs, and integrating with RDF stores or backends. Transaction support, graph merging, reasoning hooks, and data validation are features that may appear in more feature-rich RDF interfaces.

Implementation and ecosystem. RDF interfaces are implemented across multiple programming languages. Notable examples of libraries and frameworks that provide RDF APIs include Apache Jena and RDF4J in the Java ecosystem, rdflib in Python, and dotNetRDF in .NET. These tools expose graph models, serialization, parser utilities, and SPARQL engines, enabling developers to build applications that ingest, process, and query semantic data. While the term RDFi itself is not standardized, the concept aligns with the broader RDF Software Stack, where libraries serve as the interface layer between applications and RDF stores or datasets.

See also: RDF, SPARQL, RDF stores, RDF libraries.