Canadian Company Claims RDF Standard Infringes on Their Patent
News.com reports that UFIL Unified Data Technologies claims the Reference Data Framework infringes on that a U.S. patent it holds. Reference Data Framework (RDF) is an XML-based metadata standard that "allows programmers to write software to access Web resources, such as Web page content, music files and digital photos".
We first learned of this development from Ed Dumbill's article posted yesterday on the O'Reilly Network Web Site. In a related article also posted yesterday, Dale Dougherty pointed out that O'Reilly had received a letter warning it of potential patent infringement.
Perhaps future stories about this alleged patent infringement will illustrate the relationship between the RDF standard and the patent in question. At this point, we can't determine what the relationship is because all of the terminology is different.