World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced that RDF 1.1 has become a “Recommendation.” RDF 1.0 was published in 2004.Over the years,  the RDF Working Group has published a set of eight Resource Description Framework (RDF) Recommendations and four Working Group Notes.

Whats new in 1.1?

• identifiers are now IRIs (“Internationalized Resource Identifieers” — they were “RDF URI references” before).
• language-tagged literals now always have the rdf:langString datatype
• simple literals, i.e., literals without datatype do not exist anymore
• introduction of datasets (difference to SPARQL is that graph name can also be a blank node)
• a couple of new XSD datatypes are now compatible with RDF, namely xsd:duration, xsd:dayTimeDuration, xsd:yearMonthDuration, xsd:dateTimeStamp
• new rdf:HTML datatype.
• semantics uses the notion of “recognized datatypes” instead of a “datatype map”.

For more details on the changes read here.