The RDF Core working group at the W3C has released the first Working Draft of Refactoring RDF/XML Syntax.

The document describes the updates made to the formal grammar for the XML syntax for RDF after amendments and clarifications made by the working group. In particular, containers (Alt, Seq, Bag) have been removed from the EBNF specification.

The containers have not, however, disappeared from the language: they are matched by the typed node production. Formerly, there were two different productions that containers matched, leading to confusion.

Other significant changes include the mandatory inclusion of the RDF namespace prefix before attributes ID, about, aboutEach, bagID, type and resource. The previous specification was ambiguous as to whether these were required or not.

The next step is for the working group to define "for each syntax production which RDF statements are added to the resulting model (if any). It is required that this be a more precise process than before in preferably a machine checkable language, mapping from the XML syntax to the RDF model."