The semantic web is an effort promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to make more machine-processable information available on the web. The key infrastructure to build the Semantic Web is the Resource Description Framework (RDF). This is a proposed standard for metadata encoding. This chapter was mainly composed from documentation released by the W3C. It’s prime purpose is to provide an introduction to RDF for a non-technical audience, augmented by a—somewhat personal—discussion of the value of RDF. I argue that although RDF is technically highly competent, it is not sure whether it will take off, because RDF implementations have too many problems as to their social and economic viability.