Ontologies: A Silver Bullet for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce [Hardcover]

Dieter Fensel (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 3540416021 | ISBN-13: 978-3540416029 | Publication Date: August 15, 2001 | Edition: 1

Ontologies have been developed and investigated for quite a while now in artificial intelligence and natural language processing to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. More recently, the notion of ontologies has attracted attention from fields such as intelligent information integration, co-operative information systems, information retrieval, electronic commerce, and knowledge management. The author systematically introduces the notion of ontologies to the non-expert reader and demonstrates in detail how to apply this conceptual framework for improved intranet retrieval of corporate information and knowledge and for enhanced Internet-based electronic commerce. In the second part of the book, the author presents a more technical view on emerging Web standards, like XML, RDF, XSL-T, or XQL, allowing for structural and semantic modelling and description of data and information.

Editorial Reviews

Review

From the reviews of the second edition: "This book provides an excellent introduction to ontologies. … It has many examples illustrating to the reader the different characteristics of ontologies … . One of the strengths of the book is that it is presented in the context of the semantic web … . The book is a good blend of theory, applications and illustrations of ontologies. … provides depth and insight into key problems of ontologies. … provides the reader with a large number of references. … Many of the references are new … . To summarize, this is an excellent book … ." (Daniel O’Leary, The Computer Journal, Vol. 48 (4), 2005) --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From the Back Cover

Ontologies have been developed and investigated for some time in artificial intelligence to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. More recently, the notion of ontologies has attracted attention from fields such as databases, intelligent information integration, cooperative information systems, information retrieval, electronic commerce, enterprise application integration, and knowledge management. This broadened interest in ontologies is based on the feature that they provide a machine-processable semantics of information sources that can be communicated among agents as well as between software artifacts and humans. This feature makes ontologies the backbone technology of the next web generation, i.e., the Semantic Web. Ontologies are currently applied in areas such as knowledge management in large company-wide networks and call centers, and in B2C, B2G, and B2B electronic commerce. In a nutshell, ontologies enable effective and efficient access to heterogeneous and distributed information sources. Given the increasing amount of information available online, this kind of support is becoming more important day by day. The author systematically introduces the notion of ontologies to the non-expert reader and demonstrates in detail how to apply this conceptual framework for improved intranet retrieval of corporate information and knowledge and for enhanced Internet-based electronic commerce. He also describes ontology languages (XML, RDF, and OWL) and ontology tools, and the application of ontologies. In addition to structural improvements, the second edition covers recent developments relating to the Semantic Web, and emerging web-based standard languages.   --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 138 pages
• Publisher: Springer-Verlag; 1 edition (August 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3540416021
• ISBN-13: 978-3540416029
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,138,269 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Beware the Hype, April 8, 2002

By 

skeptical ontologist (Mountain View, CA United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Ontologies: A Silver Bullet for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce (Hardcover)

What I liked:
This book is a good introduction to its subject, with an overview of ontology "standards" and commercial applications. That's why I bought it.

But...
It was completed in August of 2000, and so was published before reality set in on the many technologies and companies used as case studies here. I feel that I should have known to avoid a book claiming to reveal the "silver bullet" for KM and e-commerce. I already knew from first-hand experience that there is no such thing. (That is my experience-based bias.)

Fensel is guilty of the worst of the hype that was common during the e-commerce boom. For example, in naming companies who have brought ontology-related products or services to market he repeatedly cites revenue and market size numbers which have no bearing or relevance on the quality of the technology or applications (but only on the extent of the hype and the ignorance).

The companies and on-line marketplaces cited here are either a small shell of their former selves, or are gone completely. The many ontology "standards" cited are not standard at all, but just proposed standards which have few if any viable commercial applications.

The reality is that ontologies and semantic technologies in general are still very hard to deploy successfully -- and it will likely remain that way for some time to come. It appears as if ontology standards activity has stopped. (As of April 2002 for example, the ontology.org site hasn't been updated since August of 2000.)

The book is short and does not cover the subject in much detail. Still, it provides an overview and perhaps a few ideas for those who are working hard on the long, slow path to successful deployment of technologies based on imbedded semantic knowledge.

There are no secrets to success in this book. I don't know what the opposite of a "silver bullet" is, but that is what you will find here. [update 2011: the ontology.org site, mentioned above, is now a parked domain; that's a clear and strong signal of the marketplace's response to at least some of the ideas in this book!]

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't trust the title of this book, April 10, 2002

By 

Bruno Paulet (France) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ontologies: A Silver Bullet for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce (Hardcover)

If anything, this book confirms that ontology work is still very much confined to university labs.

It contains very little about ontologies (the 8-pages chapter 2, and a quick description of some ontology languages in chapter 6), and much about :
- the author's own "Ontobroker" research (Chapter 3)
- a presentation of e-commerce for those of us who have lived on a desert island in the past 5 years (chapter 4)
- a description of XML and XSL (chapter 5)

[The Price] is a [bit] steep price for 100 pages of information that is freely and easily available on the web.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars inconsistent and expensive, February 11, 2003

By 

Z. Pär-ola - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ontologies: A Silver Bullet for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce (Hardcover)

This book is, as someone above said very hastily written. It repeats itself, and has a tacky structure, despite its 138 pages (references included). With that in mind, the price is quite hefty. but there are lots of references, which is a plus. There must be better books or papers out there which introduces ontologies.