The Resource Description Framework is a W3C recommendation for metadata.  It defines a conceptual model for metadata and an XML language for representing it.

This page is now obsolete.  My work has been promoted from a personal exploration to a formal HPLabs project on the semantic web.  New versions of Jena will be produced by that team collectively, not by me alone, and so it was appropriate to move the Jena website from my own personal web pages to an HP project site at http://www.hpl.hp.com/semweb