Also OWL functional syntax can be used which is described here (http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax/)
Turtle is a textual syntax for RDF which is highly supported. Instead of using XML you could write expressions likeexample:myClass a RDF:Class; RDF:subClass example:myParentClass"
.
This is a very natural way of writing RDF triples. The language specification could be found at http://www.dajobe.org/2004/01/turtle/ .
There exists a turtle parser for the most common web development programming laguages, which could be found at http://librdf.org/raptor/.