The original RDFS language design includes several features that hinder the
task of developers and theoreticians. This paper has two main contributions in
the direction of simplifying the language. First, it introduces a small
fragment which, preserving the normative semantics and the core
functionalities, avoids the complexities of the original specification, and
captures the main semantic functionalities of RDFS. Second, it introduces a
minimalist deduction system over this fragment, which by avoiding certain rare
cases, obtains a simple deductive system and a computationally efficient
entailment checking.