rdfsmember

rdfsmember is a term used to refer to the RDF Schema property rdfs:member, which expresses membership of a resource in a container or collection. It is part of the RDF Schema vocabulary and is commonly used to link a container resource to its member resources.

Semantics and usage

In RDF graphs, a statement using this property typically has the form: a container rdfs:member b, where a is a container resource (such as an instance of rdfs:Container or a more specific container class) and b is one of its members. The rdfs:member relation does not by itself imply any specific ordering; it is intended to denote membership rather than ordering or indexing. It can be used with any container type that appears in RDF Schema, including generic containers as well as specific RDF container types like rdf:Bag, rdf:Seq, and rdf:Alt, though those built-in containers often use their own mechanisms for member arrangement.

Relation to RDF constructs

RDF containers (such as lists and bags) provide structural means to group resources. While rdf:List, rdf:Seq, and rdf:Bag define explicit ordering and structure for lists of items, rdfs:member serves as a more general membership predicate that can connect a container to its elements without prescribing an ordering model. In practice, rdfsmember statements are common in datasets that model groupings, collections, or categories where a simple membership relation is sufficient.

Examples

In Turtle:

:MyCollection rdfs:member :ItemA .

:MyCollection rdfs:member :ItemB .

See also

- RDF Schema (RDFS)

- rdfs:member

- rdfs:Container

- RDF Containers (rdf:Bag, rdf:Seq, rdf:Alt)

- RDF

Notes

Some sources may spell the concept as rdfsmember to emphasize the RDFS membership relation, but the underlying property remains rdfs:member.