Customer Reviews

Developing Semantic Web Services

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4 star:		(1)
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This book is a comprehensive text for markup languages in general and an excellent primer on XML,RDF,OWL AND OWL-Services. It includes many illustrative examples that are followed through from chapter to chapter to provide a common thread as you move up the language pyramid. The presentation of OWL-Services includes an extensive Enterprise example that covers several chapters and is analyzed in detail. While the book is not a cookbook for a wide variety of applications it does cover semantic search technology and semantic group-ware.
The companion CD-ROM provides C# source code for an integrated development tool for XML, RDF and OWL that includes parsing and validation capability and is readily expandable.

The text is about what might sit above XML, in the making of a Semantic Web. It explains XML and several of its numerous subsets, like XPath, XPointer, XSLT and XLink. The union of all these is powerful and has led to XML being the most common format for data interchange on the Web.

But the problem is that XML does not imbue meaning to that data. Just structure. This needs other efforts. Specifically, RDF and OWL. You get a detailed look at their current abilities. A hope in this field is that those languages will suffice to make Semantic Web services.

Indeed, RDF is shown to have nice constructs, each with a "sentence" of subject, predicate and object. This rule encoding can be (and is) expressed in XML, and it can operate on XML data, given an RDF engine.

Exciting possibilities for revving up the Web. Maybe. The question as to whether they are adequate is still open.

The collaborative work of technology innovator H. Peter Alesso and research engineer Craig Smith, Developing Semantic Web Services presents the complete Language Pyramid of Web markup languages, including Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL) and OWL-Services (OWL-S), along with numerous examples and software demos. Developing Semantic Web Services also describes the semantic software development tools including design and analysis methodologies, parsers, validators, editors, development environments, and inference engines. Additionally, the source code for the "Semantic Web Author", an Integrated Development Environment for Semantic Markup Languages, is included on an accompanying CD-ROM. Reflecting their expertise arising from their many years of extended research experience at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the co-authors have succeed in producing a seminal, essential, professional level instruction manual and reference work.

The book is a well compiled resource not only for developers but also in terms of teaching semantic web services. For research and development on semantic web and web services to gain further momentum, the underlying principles need to be accessible to both developers and academics. The book achieves this objective satisfactorily.

Lured into its supposed merits, as espoused by the then single review on here, I looked forward to using this book in my work. Disappointment, however, was not far away. The book is wafflesome, and vacuous. How it claims to be useful for developers is mystifying -- an unjustified title if ever there was one. It is a useless reference source for this purpose. It is barely useful as a source of information for managers or analysts either. You've got to get past the waffle first, remember! Poor, poor, poor.