Presentation at ISWC2006 workshop on user interfaces. The pathetic fallacy is not on RDF per se, but on the efforts of showing/visualizing it as a graph...
This is a specification of a precise semantics, and corresponding complete systems of inference rules, for the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and RDF Schema (RDFS).
This document defines an abstract syntax on which RDF is based, and which serves to link its concrete syntax to its formal semantics. This abstract syntax is quite distinct from XML's tree-based infoset [XML-INFOSET]. It also includes discussion of design goals, key concepts, datatyping, character normalization and handling of URI references.
C. Bizer, E. Pietriga, D. Karger, and R. Lee. Proc. of 5th International Semantic Web Conference, Athens, GA, USA, November 5-9, 2006, LNCS 4273, (2006)