It's Time to Standardize RDF Messages

TL;DR

This paper introduces RDF Messages as atomic units for better interoperability in streaming RDF systems, enabling explicit message boundaries and supporting various use cases.

Contribution

It proposes the RDF Message concept and profiles, establishing a foundation for standardized, interoperable RDF streaming and messaging.

Findings

Defines RDF Message as an atomic RDF Dataset for communication

Enables explicit message boundaries across systems

Supports use cases like IoT, archived streams, and nanopublications

Abstract

RDF-based systems increasingly operate in event-driven and streaming settings, where producers and consumers exchange data as discrete units of communication rather than as freely mergeable RDF statements. As existing RDF semantics and tooling do not provide an interoperable notion of what statements belong together as one message, developers often rely on out-of-standard techniques, transport-level assumptions, or heuristics, leading to interoperability problems and inefficiencies. We propose the concept of an RDF Message as an RDF Dataset intended to be interpreted atomically as a single communicative act, laying the foundation for defining RDF Message Streams and RDF Message Logs. The proposal makes message boundaries explicit across serializations, transport, and storage systems, which in turn enables incremental consumption and reproducible replay in use cases such as IoT observations, archived RDF streams, nanopublications, or processing SPARQL CONSTRUCT results. Building on this, RDF Message Profiles, such as Linked Data Event Streams or ActivityStreams, then provide the terms for describing pagination, message structure, ordering, or retention policies. As part of the W3C Community Group on RDF Stream Processing, we are now seeking broader support and comments on the proposal from the Semantic Web community.