From http://www.w3schools.com (Copyright Refsnes Data)

W3C RDF and OWL Activities

RDF and OWL are two important Semantic Web technologies.

The Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a framework for sharing data between companies, applications, enterprises, communities, and people, independent of platform and software.

RDF and OWL are key Semantic Web technologies.

RDF - Resource Description Framework

RDF is a langauge for describing Web resources, such as the title, author, modification date, content, and copyright information of a Web page.

If you want to learn more about RDF, please visit W3Schools' RDF Tutorial.

OWL - Web Ontology Language

OWL is built on top of RDF, and is a language for processing information on the internet.

If you want to learn more about OWL, please visit W3Schools' RDF Tutorial.

SPARQL - Query Language for RDF

SPARQL offer developers a way to write queries across the wide range of RDF information on the internet.

W3C Specifications and Timeline

Specification	Draft / Proposal	Recommendation

RDF Primer		10. Feb 2004
RDF Test Cases		10. Feb 2004
RDF Concept		10. Feb 2004
RDF Semantics		10. Feb 2004
RDF Schema		10. Feb 2004
RDF Syntax		10. Feb 2004

OWL Overview		10. Feb 2004
OWL Guide		10. Feb 2004
OWL Reference		10. Feb 2004
OWL Syntax		10. Feb 2004
OWL Test Cases		10. Feb 2004
OWL Use Cases		10. Feb 2004
Parsing OWL in RDF	21. Jan 2004

SPARQL Requirements	25. Mar 2005
SPARQL Language		15. Jan 2008

W3C Reference

W3C Semantic Web Activity