W3C publishes draft guide to changes in RDF 1.2

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published a Group Note Draft titled What’s New in RDF 1.2.

The draft was published on 14 July 2026 by the RDF & SPARQL Working Group.

RDF, or Resource Description Framework, is a standard model for describing data as relationships. It is widely used in linked data, knowledge graphs and semantic web systems. The new document is informative. It does not set new technical requirements. Instead, it gives readers a short overview of changes introduced in RDF 1.2.

The draft is primarily aimed at people who already know RDF 1.1 and want to understand what has changed in RDF 1.1. W3C recommends that readers new to RDF start with the RDF 1.2 Primer before moving on to the technical specifications.

The note points readers to the wider RDF 1.2 specification set, including documents on RDF concepts, semantics, RDF Schema and serialisation formats such as Turtle, TriG, N-Triples, N-Quads, RDF/XML and JSON-LD.

W3C also states that the document is a work in progress. As a Group Note Draft, it is not endorsed by W3C or its members and may be updated, replaced or withdrawn.

The draft is part of a larger package of RDF 1.2 and SPARQL 1.2 work being developed by the RDF & SPARQL Working Group.