Resources
Resources are the fundamental building blocks of an rdfpub site. Resources are
identifiable concepts, like people or things or web pages or abstract ideas,
that are identified by a URI (or a URL in the case of rdfpub and the World Wide
Web). Anything in the universe can be treated as a resource; it's part of what
makes RDF so powerful!
How rdfpub resources are created
Resources in an rdfpub site are generated from any subdirectory in a site's
directory that has either of RDF data or an index.handlebars file, or both
RDF data and an index.handlebars file for resources that should have RDF data
and HTML representations that can be browsed on the web. Each component of a
resource is explained below.
URL
A resource's URL is generated from its directory path; for instance, putting a
resource in a directory /foo/bar would be combined with the site's base URI
(as described in the previous lesson) to
form a URL like https://example.com/foo/bar.
RDF
RDF is a first-class citizen in rdfpub.
What makes it so special?
- It is the data that describes everything about your resources
- It is used as the basis for your site's content
- It can be linked to other RDF data sets to express relationships between
resources
- It can be queried to extract useful information and analysis from resources
All RDF files in a resource's directory are combined into an RDF graph, and
that RDF becomes part of the resource such that the resource can return its RDF
via HTTP request and can be queried via the site's SPARQL endpoint (explained
in the next lesson). A resource's RDF can
also be queried and injected into Handlebars templates to generate HTML pages
(explained in a later lesson).
While you can create resources that don't have RDF — for which there are
perfectly valid use cases — it is expected that RDF will fuel most of your
site's content. Ignoring the value of RDF misses the point of an rdfpub site,
at which point you should ask yourself if a different website generator might
better suit your needs.
index.handlebars
The presence of an index.handlebars file indicates that a resource will serve
HTML pages that a web browser can view and navigate. The details of how this
template file is rendered are explained in
the Handlebars lesson.
Supported RDF file formats
rdfpub supports the most popular RDF formats but not all of them, and not even
all of the formats that RDF4J supports. All of the
following file extensions are associated with a specific RDF format and are
supported by rdfpub:
Every file with one of these file extensions is parsed according to its
associated RDF format and added to the resource associated with the file's
parent directory.