This paper describes the crisis of identity facing the World Wide Web and, in particular, the RDF community. It shows how that crisis is rooted in a lack of clarity about the nature of "resources" and how concepts developed during the XML Topic Maps effort can provide a solution that works not only for Topic Maps, but also for RDF and semantic web technologies in general.
This lecture elaborates on RDF, RDFS, and SOAP starting from a short recap of XML, and the history of the W3C and the development of "open standard recommendations". We also compare RDF triples with DOGMA lexons. We finalise by listing shortcomings of RDFS regarding semantics, and give short overview of the history of OWL as one answer to this. A full elaboration on OWL and description logic is for another lecture.