Creating the Semantic Web with RDF: Professional Developer's Guide (With CD-ROM) [Paperback]

Johan Hjelm (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471402591 | ISBN-13: 978-0471402596 | Publication Date: May 11, 2001

The first state-of-the-art guide for Web developers who need to enable totally new services using metadata
This book offers for the first time complete guidance for Web and content developers who use Resource Description Framework (RDF) to create Web services, both wired and wireless, for metadata, or data that is maintained by an application. Written by the W3C Fellow charged with making the W3C XML standard work with other open standards, the book clearly demonstrates how RDF and metadata can greatly improve a user's Web experience through richer, better-tailored content. The author explains RDF theory and practice and how it compares to XML and HTML in layman terms and provides source code for several important tools. He includes descriptions of real services, both for the desktop computer and the handheld wireless device, and hands-on examples illustrating how metadata is used to tailor services for users. Explanations of how RDF ties in with intelligent agents are also provided.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

An in-depth introduction to metadata and RDF basics for creating improved Web services

With the endless number of Web sites vying for attention, it's more important than ever before to stand out and offer a richer, better-tailored experience. The new Resource Description Framework (RDF) standard can accomplish this by making personalization and adaptation of content easier. Johan Hjelm guides you through all the features of RDF, explaining how to take advantage of this technology and create exciting Web services for metadata. With his book, you'll learn how to use RDF to filter content, personalize information, and develop information services and objects. He also clearly shows you how to use RDF and XML to build metadata and user profiles. These profiles can help you produce new types of services and target data to users. This means that you'll be able to reach the right people and provide them with the exact information they want!

Covering metadata and RDF basics, this book explains how to:
* Annotate text and photos using RDF
* Utilize the RDF and XML processors
* Build schemas with RDF and XML
* Use multiple metadata vocabularies and classify site information
* Transport client profiles using remote referencing, bandwidth and caching, and proxy interaction

The CD-ROM provides a number of RDF resource programs, such as editors, parsers, and inference engines, that you can use to create new services described in the book. It also contains:
* Source code for several important tools
* A description of real services with hands-on examples of how to use metadata to tailor services for users

Professional Developer's Guides

The Professional Developer's Guide series provides the first in-depth look at recent or emerging programming technologies. Experienced programmers and developers will find comprehensive coverage of new programming standards as well as code, sample programs, developer's tools, and applications that will make programming for a new technology much easier.

About the Author

JOHAN HJELM is Senior Research Engineer and Project Manager at Ericsson. Along with his research and contributions to the development of many wireless web applications, he has extensive experience with metadata technologies. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and is the author of nine previously published books including Wiley's Designing Wireless Information Services.

Product Details

• Paperback: 277 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (May 11, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471402591
• ISBN-13: 978-0471402596
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 1.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,722,234 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Irritating, October 4, 2001

By 

John W. Bates (Mendon, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Creating the Semantic Web with RDF: Professional Developer's Guide (With CD-ROM) (Paperback)

I picked up this book, and several others, because I was interested in catching up on some of the emerging protocols. From the table of contents, it looked like it presented a broad overview on a variety of topics, as well as the in-depth discussion of RDF. Frankly, though, it is one of the worst books I've read in years.

There are two problems: the content, and the author. The writing and editing is poor and sloppy. The text is disjointed to the point that I often had to flip back after moving to the next page, to make sure that I hadn't skipped one. At some points, it refers back to examples that don't exist, and at others, it refers to figures that just don't match up. The larger structure is as sloppy and disjointed as the text. It's not even useful as a reference, because no single section contains all the information needed to understand the format.

The book reads like what it is: an attempt to fill 320 pages with the information that could have been (and should have been) written in a 20 page white paper ...

His editorial comments are full of contradictions and misstatements that read more like Usenet flames than thoughtful commentary. He liberally trashes SOAP, AI, and CORBA, while ignoring or glossing over any shortcomings in RDF. My favorite contradiction: KQML is a failure because it uses a lisp-based syntax, which is *hard for humans to read*. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the book, he states that humans shouldn't write out their own RDF, and should always use a remote syntax checker, because it's just too easy to make a mistake. Looking at his half-page examples of even the simplest schemas, filled with angle brackets, quotes, and syntactic oddities, makes me long for the simplicity of a lisp-based syntax, even if I have to put up with a prefix notation.

The book is a waste of time and money. One could get more information, in a better format, and with less irritation, just by going to the w3c web site.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A bad book, April 24, 2002

By 

rattan mann (Oslo, Norway) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Creating the Semantic Web with RDF: Professional Developer's Guide (With CD-ROM) (Paperback)

In spite of the bad reviews on this site,I decided to buy this book partly because this may be the only book on the sementic web in the market,and I did not want to wait till others were published.

Unfortunately,I too cannot recommend this book to anyone.Here are
my reasons:

1)Both the title of the book as well as the title of the series(Professional Developer's Guide Series)are highly misleading.No developer will learn anything practical from this book.There are no examples or any other practical instructions whatsoever.The most "difficult" examples I could find were the analysis of statements like "Hjelm is the author of a book".

2)What this book is is a theoretical and acedemic discussion of artificial intelligence(AI),XML,RDF,and intelligent agents(IA).But here too there is a catch.You wont understand much unless you already know these fields.I have some background in these fields but I found the presentation so monotonous and boring that I too learned nothing new.

3)This book could have been a classic if properly written.Time may be ripe for artificial intelligence to enter the mainstream of computer world via the gateway of XML.Therefore,the unification of AI,XML,RDF,and IA is a highly fascinating project for the future.And a classic is desperately needed on this theme.But Hjelm's book is not that classic.

7 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars ;-( Mess, June 6, 2001

By 

Yi Zhou "Joey NJ" (Princeton, NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Creating the Semantic Web with RDF: Professional Developer's Guide (With CD-ROM) (Paperback)

This is one of the worst book that I have ever read. It makes a simple thing perplexed. I really don't know what the author wants to say and why he repeats the same unrelated and simple things over and over again. It is always off the point. The examples are just toys for laymen.