Turtle (syntax)

Terse RDF Triple Language

Filename extension	.ttl
Internet media type	text/turtle
Developed by	Dave Beckett
Type of format	Semantic Web
Container for	RDF data
Extended from	N-Triples
Standard(s)	Specification

Turtle (Terse RDF Triple Language) is a serialization format for Resource Description Framework (RDF) graphs. A subset of Tim Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly's Notation3 (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. SPARQL uses a similar N3 subset to Turtle for its graph patterns, but using N3's brace syntax for delimiting subgraphs.

Turtle was accepted as a first working draft by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) RDF Working Group on 9 August 2011.

Turtle is popular among Semantic Web developers as a human-friendly alternative to RDF/XML. A significant proportion of RDF toolkits include Turtle parsing and serializing capability. Some examples are Redland, Sesame, 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 Notation3).

The MIME type of Turtle is text/turtle. The character encoding of Turtle content is always UTF-8.

External links

• Turtle Specification