In introducing Turtle it is necessary to first introduce its established ancestors and nearest kin. Of particular importance is introducing Notation 3 (N3) and N-Triples since Turtle is in essence and extension of N-Triples which in turn was designed as a fixed subset of Notation 3.

Notation 3 was developed as early as 2000, or at least the earliest documentation dates back then. It was developed in the context of the Semantic Web Interest Group, as a sort of shorthand non-XML serialization of Resource Description Framework, RDF, models. Notation 3 is a simplified teaching language, which is basically equivalent to RDF in its XML syntax, but easier to grasp, make entries and to tailor. This is a language which is a compact and readable alternative to RDF's XML syntax, but also is extended to allow greater expressiveness. It has subsets, one of which is RDF 1.0 equivalent, and one of which is RDF plus a form of RDF rules.

Recall that RDF is the language used to input information regarding things of the web, such as webpages, and web resources. In RDF, information is simply a collection of statements, each with a subject, verb and object. In Notaion 3, of which Turtle is somewhat a derivative, such statements are called triples for the obvious reason, that it contains three parts. In Notation 3 you can write such a triple just as is with a period. For instance,

<#pat> <#knows> <#jo> .  

N-Triples is a line-based, plain text format for encoding an RDF graph and in particular for representing the correct answers for parsing RDF/XML[RDFMS] test cases as part of the RDF Core working group. It was designed to be a fixed subset of N3 and hence N3 tools such as cwm and Euler can be used to read and process it. Documentation and articles referring to N-Triples date as far back as April 2003.

An RDF graph is set of RDF triples. A subgraph is intuitively defined as a subset of the triples in the graph (i.e. RDF graph). Technically a single triple in a graph is considered a subgraph, hence to be more specific a proper subgraph is a proper subset of the triples in the graph.

Turtle which stands for Terse RDF Triple Language is a solution proposed by the W3C team for XML/RDF code which is quite verbose and a pain to write manually. We'll later indicate how Turtle improves on Notation 3.