Turtle (syntax)

Turtle (Terse RDF Triple Language) is a serialisation format for RDF (Resource Description Framework) graphs. A subset of Tim Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly's Notation 3 (N3) language, it was defined by Dave Beckett , and is a superset of the minimal N-Triples format. Unlike full N3, Turtle doesn't go beyond RDF's graph model. The SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language uses a similar N3 subset to Turtle for its graph patterns, but using N3's braces syntax for delimiting subgraphs. Turtle has no official status with any standards organization, but has become popular amongst Semantic Web developers as a human-friendly alternative to RDF/XML. A significant proportion of RDF toolkits include Turtle parsing/serialising capability, for example Redland, Jena and RDFLib.

Example

@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix ex: <http://example.org/stuff/1.0/> .

<http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar>
  dc:title "RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised)" ;
  ex:editor [
    ex:fullname "Dave Beckett";
    ex:homePage <http://purl.org/net/dajobe/>
  ] .

(Turtle examples are also valid Notation 3) The mime type of Turtle is application/x-turtle (if registered, application/turtle will be sought). Charset parameters on the mime type are forbidden; the content encoding of Turtle content is always UTF-8.

External links

• Turtle Specification