RDF for EDA is about the convergence of Electronic Design Automation and the Semantic Web. While the use of XML has been increasingly adopted by the engineering community, the impact and technology of RDF and the Semantic Web have yet to be widely understood or embraced by this community.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a declarative language and provides a standard way for using XML to represent metadata in the form of statements about properties and relationships of resources on the Web. These resources can be almost anything that can be referenced using a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). This means that you can associate metadata with a web page, a netlist, a model, a layout, a program source, a program executable, or any other object that can referenced on the Web.

RDF can provide a framework for different communities to develop vocabularies that suit their particular requirements and share those vocabularies with other communities. The descriptions of these vocabulary sets are known as RDF Schemas. An RDF schema defines the meaning, characteristics, and relationships of a set of properties, which may include constraints on potential values and the inheritance of properties from other schemas. The RDF language allows each resource that contains metadata to clarify what vocabulary is being used by assigning each vocabulary a Web address.

RDF Packages
RDF packages are available for most of the common scripting languages, like TCL, Perl, and Python. Application programs that include an embedded TCL/Perl interface can quickly become RDF/XML enabled applications.

In the coming weeks, I'll describe some of the tools and techniques available for electronic product design using RDF, DAML, and XML-RPC. Check back here for more information, or if you would like to be included on the mailing list for this work contact us directly.

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