Distributed descriptions

Instead of rdf:about, descriptions can also have attribute rdf:aboutEach or rdf:aboutEachPrefix. This allows to distribute a description over a set of resources.

• rdf:aboutEach's value must be a container's URI; the corresponding description applies to every member of the container.
• rdf:aboutEachPrefix's value is a string; the corresponding description applies to any resource whose URI starts with this string.

Implementations of RDF are not bound to keep information about those distributive descriptions - this is only a syntactic shortcut. It may result in unexpected behaviours of some agents, as soon as more than one RDF source is involved (resources defined in a source may match a distributed description in another one, but not be detected as such).

Moreover, it is not specified whether distributed description may be embedded as property values. Though this possibility is never mentioned, the formal syntax allows it. A natural interpretation would be that the property is valued by every resource matching the distributed description.