I am trying to grasp the concept of Semantic Web. I am finding it hard
to understand what exactly is the difference between RDF and OWL. Is
OWL an extension of RDF or these two are totally different
technologies?
In short, yes you could say that OWL is an extension of RDF.
In more detail, with RDF you can describe a directed graph by defining subject-predicate-object triples. The subject and the object are the nodes, the predicate is the edge, or by other words, the predicate describes the relation between the subject and the object. For example :Tolkien :wrote :LordOfTheRings or :LordOfTheRings :author :Tolkien, etc... Linked data systems use these triples to describe knowledge graphs, and they provide ways to store them, query them. Now these are huge systems, but you can use RDF by smaller projects. Every application has a domain specific language (or by DDD terms ubiquitous language). You can describe that language in your ontology/vocabulary, so you can describe the domain model of your application with a graph, which you can visualize show it to business ppl, talk about business decisions based on the model, and build the application on top of that. You can bind the vocab of your application to the data it returns and to a vocabulary known by the search engines, like microdata (for example you can use HTML with RDFA to do this), and so search engines can find your applications easily, because the knowledge about what it does will be machine processable. This is how semantic web works. (At least this is how I imagine it.)
Now to describe object oriented applications you need types, classes, properties, instances, etc... With RDF you can describe only objects. RDFS (RDF schema) helps you to describe classes, inheritance (based on objects ofc.), but it is too broad. To define constraints (for example one kid per chinese family) you need another vocab. OWL (web ontology language) does this job. OWL is an ontology which you can use to describe web applications. It integrates the XSD simpleTypes.
So RDF -> RDFS -> OWL -> MyWebApp is the order to describe your web application in a more and more specific way.
