| Terse RDF Triple Language | |
| Extension: | .ttl |
| Mime: | text/turtle |
| Owner: | Dave Beckett |
| Genre: | Semantic Web |
| Latest Release Version: | RDF 1.1 Turtle (REC) |
| Latest Release Date: | 25 February 2014 |
| Container For: | RDF data |
| Extended From: | N-Triples, Notation3 |
| Extended To: | TriG_(syntax) |
In computing, Terse RDF Triple Language (Turtle) is a syntax and file format for expressing data in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) data model. Turtle syntax is similar to that of SPARQL, an RDF query language. It is a common data format for storing RDF data, along with N-Triples, JSON-LD and RDF/XML.
RDF represents information using semantic triples, which comprise a subject, predicate, and object. Each item in the triple 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, information about Huckleberry Finn could be expressed as:
<http://example.org/person/Mark_Twain> <http://example.org/relation/author> <http://example.org/books/Huckleberry_Finn> .
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 original 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.[1]
A significant proportion of RDF toolkits include Turtle parsing and serializing capability. Some examples of such toolkits are Redland, RDF4J, Jena, Python's RDFLib and JavaScript's N3.js.
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:
The example encodes an RDF graph made of four triples, which express these facts:
Here are the triples made explicit in N-Triples notation:
bnode
bnode text/turtle. The character encoding of Turtle content is always UTF-8.[2]
TriG RDF syntax extends Turtle with support for named graphs.