Abstract: The Semantic Web is based on the idea of a common and minimal language to enable large quantities of existing data to be analyzed and processed. This triggers the need to develop the database foundations of this basic language, which is the Resource Description Framework (RDF). This paper addresses this challenge by: 1) developing an abstract model and query language suitable to formalize and prove properties about the RDF data and query language; 2) studying the RDF data model, minimal and maximal representations, as well as normal forms; 3) studying systematically the complexity of entailment in the model, and proving complexity bounds for the main problems; 4) studying the notions of query answering and containment arising in the RDF data model; and 5) proving complexity bounds for query answering and query containment. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.