Tag Results
19 posts tagged Book
Semantic Knowledge Management: Integrating Ontology Management, Knowledge Discovery, and Human Language Technologies
Despite its explosive growth over the last decade, the Web remains essentially a tool to allow humans to access information. Semantic Web technologies like RDF, OWL and other W3C standards aim to extend the Web’s capability through increased availability of machine-processable information.
Davies, Grobelnik and Mladenic have grouped contributions from renowned researchers into four parts: technology; integration aspects of knowledge management; knowledge discovery and human language technologies; and case studies. Together, they offer a concise vision of semantic knowledge management, ranging from knowledge acquisition to ontology management to knowledge integration, and their applications in domains such as telecommunications, social networks and legal information processing.
This book is an excellent combination of fundamental research, tools and applications in Semantic Web technologies. It serves the fundamental interests of researchers and developers in this field in both academia and industry who need to track Web technology developments and to understand their business implications.
Manufacturer: Springer
List Price: $99.00
Programming the Semantic Web
With this book, the promise of the Semantic Web — in which machines can find, share, and combine data on the Web — is not just a technical possibility, but a practical reality Programming the Semantic Web demonstrates several ways to implement semantic web applications, using current and emerging standards and technologies. You’ll learn how to incorporate existing data sources into semantically aware applications and publish rich semantic data.
Each chapter walks you through a single piece of semantic technology and explains how you can use it to solve real problems. Whether you’re writing a simple mashup or maintaining a high-performance enterprise solution,Programming the Semantic Web provides a standard, flexible approach for integrating and future-proofing systems and data.
This book will help you:
- Learn how the Semantic Web allows new and unexpected uses of data to emerge
- Understand how semantic technologies promote data portability with a simple, abstract model for knowledge representation
- Become familiar with semantic standards, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL)
- Make use of semantic programming techniques to both enrich and simplify current web applications
Reasonable, but disappointed.
I finished reading through chapter 6 so far… my overall impression is, reasonable, but feel inadequate.
There are some discussion I like: for example, the simple triple store implementation is illustrative, concept wise. However, the discussion on RDF serialization format, the example given, ontology, it just feels the words are hard to swallow. You would think a book about semantic should have very precise logic and explanation should be crystal clear. However, as I read it, I often get the feel something … “this should be this hard to explain, what is he talking about here?” … maybe I am expecting too much.
Reviewed 4/15/2010 by Oliver
What would it look like in Perl?
I found “Programming the Semantic Web” to be a useful introduction to the concept of a ‘triple store’, RDF, OWL and some existing software implementations. I particularly enjoyed Part 1, and found the example triple store, ‘simplegraph.py’ to be very simple, explanatory and fascinating. I wondered what it might look like in Perl, so I put together a CPAN module with a translation of the SimpleGraph class and implemented a number of programs from chapters 2 and 3 as Test::More perl tests. I do recommend this book and if you are enjoying the book and learning Perl, you might be interested to check out the VANAMBURG::SEMPROG::Simplegraph module at […] as a supplement to your learning experience.
Reviewed 1/14/2010 by Gordon L. Vanamburg
Planet Earth
This is the first book I have read on the semantic web that does not give me feeling that I am in outer space. It is also one of the few books that honestly appraises the current, usable state of the semantic web. It is clearly written and took me a day to read (without working the examples). In the beginning, it starts with a pure triples system built from the ground up, rather than plunging the reader into the standard technologies, which are levels of abstraction above triples and may not be essential. The reader is left with the impression that he is the one who chooses to use the technologies introduced. It is also the only book that mentions how RDF evolved. It contains many example programs using existing data sources (e.g. freebase). There is a two page introduction by Jim Hendler, one of the top figures in the semantic web and co-author of “The Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist” (also, a good companion book).
The main view of this book is the semantic web as extension, modification, and very major improvement, to relational systems. It also discusses the pure AI approach. I does not get into other uses of the semantic web, such as text retrieval or approaches such as topic maps.
The large majority of this book is in Python, the easiest and probably the best designed of modern languages. It has a few examples in JavaScript and Java. Readers are encouraged to implement the examples in other languages, if they are inclined to.
Physicists and chemists are required to run experiments to prove their assertions. Many other sciences have emulated aspects of physics to acquire the mantle. The semantic web does not ask for “experiments” although it is about semantics and, therefore, about something to be discovered. This book starts in that direction.
Reviewed 11/4/2009 by David B. Jensen
Several ways to implement semantic web applications are explored
Toby Segaran, et.al.’s PROGRAMMING THE SEMANTIC WEB tells how to use graph data to build solid, flexible applications - applications in which machines can find, share and combine data on the Web. Several ways to implement semantic web applications are explored in a guide that covers different pieces of semantic technology and how to use it to solve real problems.
Reviewed 10/13/2009 by Midwest Book Review
Awesome book for using RDF / Triple Store models in the real world
So much written about the Semantic Web is theoretical, often verging on esoteric. Programming the Semantic Web crosses the gap from theory to practice: it’s a book for real-world developers trying to bring products to market.
I fortuitously discovered this book just as our company embarked on the design of a new product, one that needed to store massive amounts of structured, but sparse, data culled from a variety of sources. Since most developers are trained solely in relational database structures, our initial inclination was to use a sharded relational data model to ensure we’d be able to get new developers up-to-speed and meet our deadline. Programming the Semantic Web provided a clear explanation of the limits of relational data models for this kind of data, and contained a great walk-thru of how an RDF-based model offered a multitude of benefits. In fact, using a triple store has reduced our development time dramatically. The book’s balanced discussion of the myriad of toolkits and RDF Stores available also helped us get off the ground selecting the right platform quickly.
Programming the Semantic Web is now required reading for all developers joining our project team. Using the ideas and models described in the book, we’ve made our system more scalable, more flexible, and dramatically accelerated our development cycles.
Reviewed 9/27/2009 by T. Greene
Manufacturer: O’Reilly Media
List Price: $39.99
Semantic Web Technologies: Trends and Research in Ontology-based Systems
The Semantic Web combines the descriptive languages RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language), with the data-centric, customizable XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) to provide descriptions of the content of Web documents. These machine-interpretable descriptions allow more intelligent software systems to be written, automating the analysis and exploitation of web-based information.
Software agents will be able to create automatically new services from already published services, with potentially huge implications for models of e-Business.
Semantic Web Technologies provides a comprehensive overview of key semantic knowledge technologies and research. The authors explain (semi-)automatic ontology generation and metadata extraction in depth, along with ontology management and mediation. Further chapters examine how Semantic Web technology is being applied in knowledge management (“Semantic Information Access”) and in the next generation of Web services.
Semantic Web Technologies:
- Provides a comprehensive exposition of the state-of-the art in Semantic Web research and key technologies.
- Explains the use of ontologies and metadata to achieve machine-interpretability.
- Describes methods for ontology learning and metadata generation.
- Discusses ontology management and evolution, covering ontology change detection and propagation, ontology dependency and mediation.
- Illustrates the theoretical concepts with three case studies on industrial applications in digital libraries, the legal sector and the telecommunication industry.
Graduate and advanced undergraduate students, academic and industrial researchers in the field will all find Semantic Web Technologies an essential guide to the technologies of the Semantic Web.
State of the art
Although the subjects of each chapter seem quite different, you get a grasp of the current state of the art technology of the semantic web after finishing the book. I can recommend this book to whoever is going to construct hubs in the semantic web.
Reviewed 1/5/2007 by W. J. Hofman
more useful for making new documents
The Semantic Web is said to be the future of the Web. This book suggests how that might come about. It has extensive explanations of RDF and OWL, both overlaid on XML. One big idea is to move towards Web Services and to be able to compose these into more complex entities, in a programmatic manner. Another main hope is to be able to write future documents in RDF/OWL, that can be parsed and “understood” in a way not easily possible with conventional HTML documents.
Note that these future documents need not necessarily be published on the Web. You could have a bunch of them in a database.
Perhaps the most plausible use of the book is in designing these future documents. Sections in the book describe how to semi-automatically derive these from existing, non-RDF or OWL data. Like existing web pages. A hard task, if you want to find some kind of semantic meaning. This book might be considered part of the Artificial Intelligence field. But trying to tackle the general problem via the smaller step of building the Semantic Web.
Reviewed 8/4/2006 by W Boudville
Manufacturer: Wiley
List Price: $130.00
Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies (Chapman & Hall/CRC Textbooks in Computing)
With more substantial funding from research organizations and industry, numerous large-scale applications, and recently developed technologies, the Semantic Web is quickly emerging as a well-recognized and important area of computer science. While Semantic Web technologies are still rapidly evolving, Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies focuses on the established foundations in this area that have become relatively stable over time. It thoroughly covers basic introductions and intuitions, technical details, and formal foundations.
The book concentrates on Semantic Web technologies standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium: RDF and SPARQL enable data exchange and querying, RDFS and OWL provide expressive ontology modeling, and RIF supports rule-based modeling. The text also describes methods for specifying, querying, and reasoning with ontological information. In addition, it explores topics that are clearly beyond foundations, such as tools, applications, and engineering aspects.
Written by highly respected researchers with a deep understanding of the material, this text centers on the formal specifications of the subject and supplies many pointers that are useful for employing Semantic Web technologies in practice.
The book has an accompanying website with supplemental information.Horrible Read
I have some basic familiarity with RDF, and Semantic Technologies. This book from chapter 1 on was a horrible read. Terribly written with long arduous run on sentences which were frustrating to comprehend. The examples were atrocious. The book was written by academics who must like hearing themselves speak. The writing was so bad it reminded me of reading a legal contract. I bought the book since it was rather new, and my other OWL, RDF, and Semantic Web books are a bit dated now. I was looking for some help with modeling best practices. I generally don’t return books, but this one is already in the box again. I’d use it as a door stop but the almost $80 price tag prevents me from using it as such.
Reviewed 7/4/2010 by E. Martinez
Most complete book about RDF, OWL, Rules and SPARQL
The most completed book about Semantic Web technologies RDF and OWL, and its formal semantics. Well illustrated with examples and codes. Very exhaustive. The book also covers Rules and SPARQL, and comes with a lot of exercises.
The content is up to date and covers recent recommendations from the W3C like OWL2 and SROIQ knowledge bases.
A brief overview of XML and predicate logic is given as appendix.
Personally, I would have appreciated a more precise introduction about the Semantic Web architecture and technologies, and some words about the upper layers which are not covered by this book (proof and trust).
Reviewed 4/25/2010 by Serge Linckels
Manufacturer: Chapman and Hall/CRC
List Price: $79.95
Semantic Web For Dummies
Semantic Web technology is already changing how we interact with data on the Web. By connecting random information on the Internet in new ways, Web 3.0, as it is sometimes called, represents an exciting online evolution.
Whether you’re a consumer doing research online, a business owner who wants to offer your customers the most useful Web site, or an IT manager eager to understand Semantic Web solutions, Semantic Web For Dummies is the place to start! It will help you:
- Know how the typical Internet user will recognize the effects of the Semantic Web
- Explore all the benefits the data Web offers to businesses and decide whether it’s right for your business
- Make sense of the technology and identify applications for it
- See how the Semantic Web is about data while the “old” Internet was about documents
- Tour the architectures, strategies, and standards involved in Semantic Web technology
- Learn a bit about the languages that make it all work: Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL)
- Discover the variety of information-based jobs that could become available in a data-driven economy
You’ll also find a quick primer on tech specifications, some key priorities for CIOs, and tools to help you sort the hype from the reality. There are case studies of early Semantic Web successes and a list of common myths you may encounter. Whether you’re incorporating the Semantic Web in the workplace or using it at home, Semantic Web For Dummies will help you define, develop, implement, and use Web 3.0.
Start Your Semantic Web Journey Here
Semantic Web for Dummies is a wide-ranging look at the Semantic Web (also known as Web 3.0) that will open your mind to the potential of this new era in web development. Mr. Pollock’s book is an intelligent and informative explanation of this software technology. Although not an in-depth programming book - it provides an excellent overview of the salient features of Web 3.0. First off, while I, too, am an Oracle employee, as is Mr. Pollock, I have never met him or communicated with him in any way.
I had previously read a couple of articles on the subject but didn’t really see the big picture and felt pretty clueless as to what it exactly is and why it matters (definition of a “dummy”, I guess); so l was looking for a single source to stitch it all together and get me started on the semantic web journey. This book fits the bill nicely. Pollock arms you with a solid understanding of what core technologies make up the Semantic Web.
As Pollock explains, key to understanding what differentiates the Semantic Web from previous web development is that it creates a “data web”; i.e., webs of data that are interconnected, accessible and logically analyzable and, thus, of benefit to users. That’s really the “why” of the semantic web.
Semantic Web for Dummies includes chapters on the core “languages”, RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language); other chapters explain metadata and ontologies. Part IV, entitled, “Putting the Semantic Web to Work” brings the Semantic Web’s utility into the business world touching on enterprise and software development issues including the key aspect of building a knowledge-base incorporating both system management and security issues. Proving he understands the implementation risks facing any implementer using new technology, Pollock also provides a chapter outlining the limitations of the Semantic Web for business development. The book points you to both open source and proprietary semantic tools and current web sites using semantic technologies.
I’d say that after reading this book, I’m not a Semantic Web expert, but I’m no longer a dummy.
Reviewed 3/30/2010 by Tom Provenzano
I feel like a Dummy for buying this book
I should have known this book would suck. I have never had great luck with the “For Dummies,” but I was itching to get a Semantic Web book while I was in a Borders brick and mortar store so I rolled the dice. Big mistake. The author managed to pump enough BS into the book that it takes until half-way-in before you see your first RDF triple. He repeats himself incessantly. This sort of writing really pisses me off because it comes off like the author is just trying to fill pages… well guess what, it wastes my time! His explanations of relational databases and object oriented programming (a) don’t belong in the book, (b) long, and (c) are poor. He comes off like a total academic with no real-world experience. This guy sounds like the type of professor I really really hate.
I have only ever reviewed one other product, but I am trying to shop for a real tech book and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to review this as I’m thumbing through amazon’s pages.
Reviewed 1/27/2010 by Chris Williams
A must-read for anybody interested in the Future of the Web
The Semantic Web is the logical next step in the evolution of the ENTIRE Web, and this book makes a strong case why its not all hype and a pipe-dream as some detractors would put it.
And Jeff Pollock knows what he’s talking about. A well-known figure in Semantic Web circles, he also manages Fusion - Oracle’s middleware solution for the enterprise.
In it, he clearly explains what’s wrong with the current state of the Web, and how we manage and produce data in general. He shows how Semantic technologies can clear the way for computers and systems not only in helping us produce (and drown ourselves) in a sea of data, but actually help us consume and find information in it.
Despite the “for Dummies” pejorative, the text is actually quite useful even for veteran Semantic Web followers. It gives a grand (though necessarily abbreviated) tour of all the foundation standards and technologies in the context of their applications in everyday life and behind the corporate firewall.
For a corporate practitioner like myself that has long struggled with abstract, academic examples, the book is a long-awaited addition that will help me evangelize the promise of “the grand database in the sky”.
Reviewed 3/28/2009 by Joel Natividad
Manufacturer: For Dummies
List Price: $29.99
Semantic Web For Dummies
Semantic Web technology is already changing how we interact with data on the Web. By connecting random information on the Internet in new ways, Web 3.0, as it is sometimes called, represents an exciting online evolution.
Whether you’re a consumer doing research online, a business owner who wants to offer your customers the most useful Web site, or an IT manager eager to understand Semantic Web solutions, Semantic Web For Dummies is the place to start! It will help you:
- Know how the typical Internet user will recognize the effects of the Semantic Web
- Explore all the benefits the data Web offers to businesses and decide whether it’s right for your business
- Make sense of the technology and identify applications for it
- See how the Semantic Web is about data while the “old” Internet was about documents
- Tour the architectures, strategies, and standards involved in Semantic Web technology
- Learn a bit about the languages that make it all work: Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL)
- Discover the variety of information-based jobs that could become available in a data-driven economy
You’ll also find a quick primer on tech specifications, some key priorities for CIOs, and tools to help you sort the hype from the reality. There are case studies of early Semantic Web successes and a list of common myths you may encounter. Whether you’re incorporating the Semantic Web in the workplace or using it at home, Semantic Web For Dummies will help you define, develop, implement, and use Web 3.0.
Start Your Semantic Web Journey Here
Semantic Web for Dummies is a wide-ranging look at the Semantic Web (also known as Web 3.0) that will open your mind to the potential of this new era in web development. Mr. Pollock’s book is an intelligent and informative explanation of this software technology. Although not an in-depth programming book - it provides an excellent overview of the salient features of Web 3.0. First off, while I, too, am an Oracle employee, as is Mr. Pollock, I have never met him or communicated with him in any way.
I had previously read a couple of articles on the subject but didn’t really see the big picture and felt pretty clueless as to what it exactly is and why it matters (definition of a “dummy”, I guess); so l was looking for a single source to stitch it all together and get me started on the semantic web journey. This book fits the bill nicely. Pollock arms you with a solid understanding of what core technologies make up the Semantic Web.
As Pollock explains, key to understanding what differentiates the Semantic Web from previous web development is that it creates a “data web”; i.e., webs of data that are interconnected, accessible and logically analyzable and, thus, of benefit to users. That’s really the “why” of the semantic web.
Semantic Web for Dummies includes chapters on the core “languages”, RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language); other chapters explain metadata and ontologies. Part IV, entitled, “Putting the Semantic Web to Work” brings the Semantic Web’s utility into the business world touching on enterprise and software development issues including the key aspect of building a knowledge-base incorporating both system management and security issues. Proving he understands the implementation risks facing any implementer using new technology, Pollock also provides a chapter outlining the limitations of the Semantic Web for business development. The book points you to both open source and proprietary semantic tools and current web sites using semantic technologies.
I’d say that after reading this book, I’m not a Semantic Web expert, but I’m no longer a dummy.
Reviewed 3/30/2010 by Tom Provenzano
I feel like a Dummy for buying this book
I should have known this book would suck. I have never had great luck with the “For Dummies,” but I was itching to get a Semantic Web book while I was in a Borders brick and mortar store so I rolled the dice. Big mistake. The author managed to pump enough BS into the book that it takes until half-way-in before you see your first RDF triple. He repeats himself incessantly. This sort of writing really pisses me off because it comes off like the author is just trying to fill pages… well guess what, it wastes my time! His explanations of relational databases and object oriented programming (a) don’t belong in the book, (b) long, and (c) are poor. He comes off like a total academic with no real-world experience. This guy sounds like the type of professor I really really hate.
I have only ever reviewed one other product, but I am trying to shop for a real tech book and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to review this as I’m thumbing through amazon’s pages.
Reviewed 1/27/2010 by Chris Williams
A must-read for anybody interested in the Future of the Web
The Semantic Web is the logical next step in the evolution of the ENTIRE Web, and this book makes a strong case why its not all hype and a pipe-dream as some detractors would put it.
And Jeff Pollock knows what he’s talking about. A well-known figure in Semantic Web circles, he also manages Fusion - Oracle’s middleware solution for the enterprise.
In it, he clearly explains what’s wrong with the current state of the Web, and how we manage and produce data in general. He shows how Semantic technologies can clear the way for computers and systems not only in helping us produce (and drown ourselves) in a sea of data, but actually help us consume and find information in it.
Despite the “for Dummies” pejorative, the text is actually quite useful even for veteran Semantic Web followers. It gives a grand (though necessarily abbreviated) tour of all the foundation standards and technologies in the context of their applications in everyday life and behind the corporate firewall.
For a corporate practitioner like myself that has long struggled with abstract, academic examples, the book is a long-awaited addition that will help me evangelize the promise of “the grand database in the sky”.
Reviewed 3/28/2009 by Joel Natividad
Manufacturer: For Dummies
List Price: $29.99
Semantic Web For Dummies
Semantic Web technology is already changing how we interact with data on the Web. By connecting random information on the Internet in new ways, Web 3.0, as it is sometimes called, represents an exciting online evolution.
Whether you’re a consumer doing research online, a business owner who wants to offer your customers the most useful Web site, or an IT manager eager to understand Semantic Web solutions, Semantic Web For Dummies is the place to start! It will help you:
- Know how the typical Internet user will recognize the effects of the Semantic Web
- Explore all the benefits the data Web offers to businesses and decide whether it’s right for your business
- Make sense of the technology and identify applications for it
- See how the Semantic Web is about data while the “old” Internet was about documents
- Tour the architectures, strategies, and standards involved in Semantic Web technology
- Learn a bit about the languages that make it all work: Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL)
- Discover the variety of information-based jobs that could become available in a data-driven economy
You’ll also find a quick primer on tech specifications, some key priorities for CIOs, and tools to help you sort the hype from the reality. There are case studies of early Semantic Web successes and a list of common myths you may encounter. Whether you’re incorporating the Semantic Web in the workplace or using it at home, Semantic Web For Dummies will help you define, develop, implement, and use Web 3.0.
Start Your Semantic Web Journey Here
Semantic Web for Dummies is a wide-ranging look at the Semantic Web (also known as Web 3.0) that will open your mind to the potential of this new era in web development. Mr. Pollock’s book is an intelligent and informative explanation of this software technology. Although not an in-depth programming book - it provides an excellent overview of the salient features of Web 3.0. First off, while I, too, am an Oracle employee, as is Mr. Pollock, I have never met him or communicated with him in any way.
I had previously read a couple of articles on the subject but didn’t really see the big picture and felt pretty clueless as to what it exactly is and why it matters (definition of a “dummy”, I guess); so l was looking for a single source to stitch it all together and get me started on the semantic web journey. This book fits the bill nicely. Pollock arms you with a solid understanding of what core technologies make up the Semantic Web.
As Pollock explains, key to understanding what differentiates the Semantic Web from previous web development is that it creates a “data web”; i.e., webs of data that are interconnected, accessible and logically analyzable and, thus, of benefit to users. That’s really the “why” of the semantic web.
Semantic Web for Dummies includes chapters on the core “languages”, RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language); other chapters explain metadata and ontologies. Part IV, entitled, “Putting the Semantic Web to Work” brings the Semantic Web’s utility into the business world touching on enterprise and software development issues including the key aspect of building a knowledge-base incorporating both system management and security issues. Proving he understands the implementation risks facing any implementer using new technology, Pollock also provides a chapter outlining the limitations of the Semantic Web for business development. The book points you to both open source and proprietary semantic tools and current web sites using semantic technologies.
I’d say that after reading this book, I’m not a Semantic Web expert, but I’m no longer a dummy.
Reviewed 3/30/2010 by Tom Provenzano
I feel like a Dummy for buying this book
I should have known this book would suck. I have never had great luck with the “For Dummies,” but I was itching to get a Semantic Web book while I was in a Borders brick and mortar store so I rolled the dice. Big mistake. The author managed to pump enough BS into the book that it takes until half-way-in before you see your first RDF triple. He repeats himself incessantly. This sort of writing really pisses me off because it comes off like the author is just trying to fill pages… well guess what, it wastes my time! His explanations of relational databases and object oriented programming (a) don’t belong in the book, (b) long, and (c) are poor. He comes off like a total academic with no real-world experience. This guy sounds like the type of professor I really really hate.
I have only ever reviewed one other product, but I am trying to shop for a real tech book and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to review this as I’m thumbing through amazon’s pages.
Reviewed 1/27/2010 by Chris Williams
A must-read for anybody interested in the Future of the Web
The Semantic Web is the logical next step in the evolution of the ENTIRE Web, and this book makes a strong case why its not all hype and a pipe-dream as some detractors would put it.
And Jeff Pollock knows what he’s talking about. A well-known figure in Semantic Web circles, he also manages Fusion - Oracle’s middleware solution for the enterprise.
In it, he clearly explains what’s wrong with the current state of the Web, and how we manage and produce data in general. He shows how Semantic technologies can clear the way for computers and systems not only in helping us produce (and drown ourselves) in a sea of data, but actually help us consume and find information in it.
Despite the “for Dummies” pejorative, the text is actually quite useful even for veteran Semantic Web followers. It gives a grand (though necessarily abbreviated) tour of all the foundation standards and technologies in the context of their applications in everyday life and behind the corporate firewall.
For a corporate practitioner like myself that has long struggled with abstract, academic examples, the book is a long-awaited addition that will help me evangelize the promise of “the grand database in the sky”.
Reviewed 3/28/2009 by Joel Natividad
Manufacturer: For Dummies
List Price: $29.99
Semantic Web: Concepts, Technologies and Applications (NASA Monographs in Systems and Software Engineering)
Although the Web is growing at an astounding pace, surpassing the 8 billion page mark, most pages are still designed for human consumption and cannot be processed by machines. Computers are used to display the information, but human intervention is still required to interpret the results. The Semantic Web unleashes a revolution of new possibilities in which content is given formal, machine processable semantics.
This book provides a well-paced introduction to the Semantic Web. It covers a wide range of topics, from new trends (ontologies, rules) to existing technologies (Web Services and software agents) to more formal aspects (logic and inference). It includes: real-world (and complete) examples of the application of Semantic Web concepts; how the technology presented and discussed throughout the book can be extended to other application areas, i.e. Geographic Information Sciences, Bioinformatics and Fine Arts.
unsolved semantic web
The fact that the book comes out of NASA is a good indicator of how some large organisations are taking seriously the rise of the Semantic Web. It explains how the current Web (the so-called 1.0 version) has its limitations, despite its huge success. That success is due to the construction of webpages, that are meant for human visual and manual comprehension. The mixture of presentation and content in a typical webpage is immensely aggravating if you want to construct ways to extract meaning.
In an effort to rise above 1.0, the book talks about many software technologies that have arisen. The base technology is surely XML. From the text, you can think of XML as HTML, except that you, the author, get to define the tags. Whereas HTML comes with hardwired tags.
But while XML is a great start, the problems only begin. While you, a human, can now define tags, the meaning and intent of what you define still has to be discerned by others. If this can only be done manually, then we are only slightly better off than 1.0. How to do this programmatically? This, in essence, is what the book devotes most of its space to. Ontologies have to be defined. Terms and meanings tied together. Then there are Web Services. So that organisations can build automated interactions with others. Perhaps to facilitate e-commerce. Or to extend and automate a supply chain. An entire panoply of standards has arisen; described as WS-*. Like Web Service Description Language. And Web Service Business Process Execution Language. Very easy to trip over some of the book’s jargon. Unfortunately, you have to get used to it.
Much is still unresolved. You get an appreciation of where we are, and how far we have to go.
Reviewed 3/15/2008 by W Boudville
Manufacturer: Springer
List Price: $99.00
Programming the Semantic Web
With this book, the promise of the Semantic Web — in which machines can find, share, and combine data on the Web — is not just a technical possibility, but a practical reality Programming the Semantic Web demonstrates several ways to implement semantic web applications, using current and emerging standards and technologies. You’ll learn how to incorporate existing data sources into semantically aware applications and publish rich semantic data.
Each chapter walks you through a single piece of semantic technology and explains how you can use it to solve real problems. Whether you’re writing a simple mashup or maintaining a high-performance enterprise solution,Programming the Semantic Web provides a standard, flexible approach for integrating and future-proofing systems and data.
This book will help you:
- Learn how the Semantic Web allows new and unexpected uses of data to emerge
- Understand how semantic technologies promote data portability with a simple, abstract model for knowledge representation
- Become familiar with semantic standards, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL)
- Make use of semantic programming techniques to both enrich and simplify current web applications
Reasonable, but disappointed.
I finished reading through chapter 6 so far… my overall impression is, reasonable, but feel inadequate.
There are some discussion I like: for example, the simple triple store implementation is illustrative, concept wise. However, the discussion on RDF serialization format, the example given, ontology, it just feels the words are hard to swallow. You would think a book about semantic should have very precise logic and explanation should be crystal clear. However, as I read it, I often get the feel something … “this should be this hard to explain, what is he talking about here?” … maybe I am expecting too much.
Reviewed 4/15/2010 by Oliver
What would it look like in Perl?
I found “Programming the Semantic Web” to be a useful introduction to the concept of a ‘triple store’, RDF, OWL and some existing software implementations. I particularly enjoyed Part 1, and found the example triple store, ‘simplegraph.py’ to be very simple, explanatory and fascinating. I wondered what it might look like in Perl, so I put together a CPAN module with a translation of the SimpleGraph class and implemented a number of programs from chapters 2 and 3 as Test::More perl tests. I do recommend this book and if you are enjoying the book and learning Perl, you might be interested to check out the VANAMBURG::SEMPROG::Simplegraph module at […] as a supplement to your learning experience.
Reviewed 1/14/2010 by Gordon L. Vanamburg
Planet Earth
This is the first book I have read on the semantic web that does not give me feeling that I am in outer space. It is also one of the few books that honestly appraises the current, usable state of the semantic web. It is clearly written and took me a day to read (without working the examples). In the beginning, it starts with a pure triples system built from the ground up, rather than plunging the reader into the standard technologies, which are levels of abstraction above triples and may not be essential. The reader is left with the impression that he is the one who chooses to use the technologies introduced. It is also the only book that mentions how RDF evolved. It contains many example programs using existing data sources (e.g. freebase). There is a two page introduction by Jim Hendler, one of the top figures in the semantic web and co-author of “The Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist” (also, a good companion book).
The main view of this book is the semantic web as extension, modification, and very major improvement, to relational systems. It also discusses the pure AI approach. I does not get into other uses of the semantic web, such as text retrieval or approaches such as topic maps.
The large majority of this book is in Python, the easiest and probably the best designed of modern languages. It has a few examples in JavaScript and Java. Readers are encouraged to implement the examples in other languages, if they are inclined to.
Physicists and chemists are required to run experiments to prove their assertions. Many other sciences have emulated aspects of physics to acquire the mantle. The semantic web does not ask for “experiments” although it is about semantics and, therefore, about something to be discovered. This book starts in that direction.
Reviewed 11/4/2009 by David B. Jensen
Several ways to implement semantic web applications are explored
Toby Segaran, et.al.’s PROGRAMMING THE SEMANTIC WEB tells how to use graph data to build solid, flexible applications - applications in which machines can find, share and combine data on the Web. Several ways to implement semantic web applications are explored in a guide that covers different pieces of semantic technology and how to use it to solve real problems.
Reviewed 10/13/2009 by Midwest Book Review
Awesome book for using RDF / Triple Store models in the real world
So much written about the Semantic Web is theoretical, often verging on esoteric. Programming the Semantic Web crosses the gap from theory to practice: it’s a book for real-world developers trying to bring products to market.
I fortuitously discovered this book just as our company embarked on the design of a new product, one that needed to store massive amounts of structured, but sparse, data culled from a variety of sources. Since most developers are trained solely in relational database structures, our initial inclination was to use a sharded relational data model to ensure we’d be able to get new developers up-to-speed and meet our deadline. Programming the Semantic Web provided a clear explanation of the limits of relational data models for this kind of data, and contained a great walk-thru of how an RDF-based model offered a multitude of benefits. In fact, using a triple store has reduced our development time dramatically. The book’s balanced discussion of the myriad of toolkits and RDF Stores available also helped us get off the ground selecting the right platform quickly.
Programming the Semantic Web is now required reading for all developers joining our project team. Using the ideas and models described in the book, we’ve made our system more scalable, more flexible, and dramatically accelerated our development cycles.
Reviewed 9/27/2009 by T. Greene
Manufacturer: O’Reilly Media
List Price: $39.99
Semantic Web Technologies: Trends and Research in Ontology-based Systems
The Semantic Web combines the descriptive languages RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language), with the data-centric, customizable XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) to provide descriptions of the content of Web documents. These machine-interpretable descriptions allow more intelligent software systems to be written, automating the analysis and exploitation of web-based information.
Software agents will be able to create automatically new services from already published services, with potentially huge implications for models of e-Business.
Semantic Web Technologies provides a comprehensive overview of key semantic knowledge technologies and research. The authors explain (semi-)automatic ontology generation and metadata extraction in depth, along with ontology management and mediation. Further chapters examine how Semantic Web technology is being applied in knowledge management (“Semantic Information Access”) and in the next generation of Web services.
Semantic Web Technologies:
- Provides a comprehensive exposition of the state-of-the art in Semantic Web research and key technologies.
- Explains the use of ontologies and metadata to achieve machine-interpretability.
- Describes methods for ontology learning and metadata generation.
- Discusses ontology management and evolution, covering ontology change detection and propagation, ontology dependency and mediation.
- Illustrates the theoretical concepts with three case studies on industrial applications in digital libraries, the legal sector and the telecommunication industry.
Graduate and advanced undergraduate students, academic and industrial researchers in the field will all find Semantic Web Technologies an essential guide to the technologies of the Semantic Web.
State of the art
Although the subjects of each chapter seem quite different, you get a grasp of the current state of the art technology of the semantic web after finishing the book. I can recommend this book to whoever is going to construct hubs in the semantic web.
Reviewed 1/5/2007 by W. J. Hofman
more useful for making new documents
The Semantic Web is said to be the future of the Web. This book suggests how that might come about. It has extensive explanations of RDF and OWL, both overlaid on XML. One big idea is to move towards Web Services and to be able to compose these into more complex entities, in a programmatic manner. Another main hope is to be able to write future documents in RDF/OWL, that can be parsed and “understood” in a way not easily possible with conventional HTML documents.
Note that these future documents need not necessarily be published on the Web. You could have a bunch of them in a database.
Perhaps the most plausible use of the book is in designing these future documents. Sections in the book describe how to semi-automatically derive these from existing, non-RDF or OWL data. Like existing web pages. A hard task, if you want to find some kind of semantic meaning. This book might be considered part of the Artificial Intelligence field. But trying to tackle the general problem via the smaller step of building the Semantic Web.
Reviewed 8/4/2006 by W Boudville
Manufacturer: Wiley
List Price: $130.00
