Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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

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.

This is not the best book. I have read some other books that cover semantic web technologies and languages in easy way to understand. Also, they cover proof and trust which this book does not cover.

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).