Graph Transformations for the Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to facilitate the representation and ex- change of structured (meta-)data in the "Semantic Web". While there is a large body of work dealing with inference on RDF, a concept for transformation and manipu- lation is still missing. Since RDF uses graphs as a formal basis, this paper pro- poses the use of algebraic graph transformations with their wealth of well-known constructions and results for this purpose. It turns out that RDF graphs are an in- teresting application area for graph transformation methods, where some significant differences to classical graphs yield practically relevant solutions for features like attribution, typing and globally unique nodes.