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TWed Talk: Ora Lassila on "The Status of RDF 1.2" (4:30p, 29 Apr, Winslow 1140)

Posted April 24, 2026
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Pizza and salads arrive at 4:00p; talk begins at 4:30p.

WHAT: TWed Talk: "RDF 1.2 Status"
WHO: Ora Lassila
WHEN: 4:30p, Weds, 29 Apr 2026
WHERE: Winslow 1140
EVENT PAGE: https://bit.ly/4sRwcWA
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/EkdEMSv6cMk

Please join us 4:30p, Weds, 29 Apr for a very special TWed Talk as we welcome Ora Lassila, co-creator of the Semantic Web, co-author with Tim Berners-Lee and Jim Hendler of the milestone "The Semantic Web" article, and most recently a leader of the W3C's RDF-Star and RDF 1.2 initiatives. In this informal talk Ora will lead us in a discussion of the status of RDF 1.2. Pizza and salads arrive at 4p, the talk begins at 4:30p

DESCRIPTION: The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a framework for representing information on the Web. Compared to RDF 1.1, RDF 1.2 introduces the ability to use an RDF triple as a triple term, in the object position of another triple. RDF 1.2 also introduces directional language-tagged strings, which contain a base direction component that allows the initial text direction to be specified for presentation by a user agent. Finally, to ease the transition from RDF 1.1, the RDF 1.2 specification introduces a mechanism for explicitly conveying the version of RDF that is used by a given piece of data.

BIO: Dr. Ora Lassila has studied, researched, and applied AI technologies his entire professional career, while working in organizations such as CMU, MIT, Nokia Research, Pegasystems, State Street, and Amazon Web Services. In the late 1990s he took his experience of symbolic AI and frame-based knowledge representation and started the work on the W3C RDF representation language, arguably the most successful effort in taking knowledge representation research “from the lab” and moving it into the software industry “mainstream”. He was a co-author of the article that laid out the vision for the so-called Semantic Web, and most recently has been co-chairing the W3C working group that is defining the next version of RDF. He received his doctorate in CS and AI from the Helsinki University of Technology. https://www.lassila.org/