title: How is rdf Encoded for fast retrieval?
body: <p>I'm reading on rdf and web schema and came across <a href="http://cs.ulb.ac.be/public/teaching/projh402" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this statement</a>. "To ensure that the knowledge is encoded for fast retrieval, the RDF store will first encode all variable-length URLs in the dataset by fixed-width integers, among other things. Each RDF triple will then be encoded by their corresponding integer triples (integer_of_subject, integer_of_property, integer_of_object)."
  I don't understand what or where are these fixed width integers? how are these corresponding integers found or created? I'm at a loss I search for encoding but only get more confused.</p>