Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies (Chapman & Hall/CRC Textbooks in Computing) [Hardcover]

Pascal Hitzler (Author), Markus Krötzsch (Author), Sebastian Rudolph (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 142009050X | ISBN-13: 978-1420090505 | Publication Date: August 6, 2009 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A 2010 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

… The nine chapters of the book guide the reader through the major foundational languages for the semantic Web and highlight the formal semantics. … the book has very interesting supporting material and exercises, is oriented to W3C standards, and provides the necessary foundations for the semantic Web. It will be easy to follow by the computer scientist who already has a basic background on semantic Web issues; it will also be helpful for both self-study and teaching purposes. I recommend this book primarily as a complementary textbook for a graduate or undergraduate course in a computer science or a Web science academic program.
—Computing Reviews, February 2010

This book is unique in several respects. It contains an in-depth treatment of all the major foundational languages for the Semantic Web and provides a full treatment of the underlying formal semantics, which is central to the Semantic Web effort. It is also the very first textbook that addresses the forthcoming W3C recommended standards OWL 2 and RIF. Furthermore, the covered topics and underlying concepts are easily accessible for the reader due to a clear separation of syntax and semantics … I am confident this book will be well received and play an important role in training a larger number of students who will seek to become proficient in this growing discipline.
—From the Foreword, Amit Sheth, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, USA

About the Author

Pascal Hitzler works in the Kno.e.sis Center at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, USA.
Sebastian Rudolph works in the institute AIFB at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany.
Markus Krötzsch works in the Computing Laboratory of the University of Oxford, England, UK.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 456 pages
• Publisher: Chapman and Hall/CRC; 1 edition (August 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 142009050X
• ISBN-13: 978-1420090505
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #781,800 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Horrible Read, July 4, 2010

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E. Martinez (Florida) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies (Chapman & Hall/CRC Textbooks in Computing) (Hardcover)

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars Lucky Choice, October 5, 2011

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Neg - See all my reviews

This review is from: Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies (Chapman & Hall/CRC Textbooks in Computing) (Hardcover)

I chose a used book, but they gave me a new one, and I feel lucky and happy with my choice.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book on FOUNDATIONS of SW, March 22, 2011

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Rommel Carvalho "Rommel Carvalho" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies (Chapman & Hall/CRC Textbooks in Computing) (Hardcover)

I usually do not write reviews, in fact, I think this is my first time. However, I felt obligated to write one, since it has been a great help on my PhD work.

First of all, if you are looking for a book on best practices on how to model your ontologies this is not the book for you. In fact, I have bought some other books for that, but none lived to my expectations.

However, if you are like me and want to actually understand the theory and foundations of RDF and OWL this is a must. I am currently working on a new language for probabilistic ontologies and I wanted to make sure I had a good understanding of OWL and RDF before I moved forward. I have read a lot of papers and books before this one, but I have to say this was by far the best read!

The authors also make some presentations available on the web in case you want to use them to teach others. I have used their material to "teach" my advisors in order to make sure I understood what I read. And I have to say it was of great help.

All in all, if you are looking for a book to understand what you can represent in RDF and OWL (syntax and semantics), the problems of merging rules and OWL, how DL reasoners work (Tableaux), and what kind of queries you can ask in RDF/OWL and a bit on how they work, I highly recommend this book. Otherwise, if you looking for a ontology engineering book, this is not for you (it just has one chapter on this topic and it just touches the surface on the subject). But then again, this book is not supposed to be a book on ontology engineering in the first place.