Customer Reviews

The Semantic Web: A Guide to the Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Lots on XML, little on the Semantic Web. Not clear what audience the book is geared towards.

For managers the book is too heavy on the technical details of XML and XML Schema. For developers and architects who would actually want to implement a semantic application there is too little substance on ontologies, semantic web, semantic web services or OWL to be of any use.

Many chapters (and the book in general) are poorly organized. For a much better (and more practical) explanation of the key concepts check out the recently released "Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web".

The book throws around all of the right buzzwords: ontologies, XML, KIF, taxonomies, metadata, etc. However, it never even properly defines these terms or organizes the information. If you already understand what the semantic web is, the book makes perfect sense but you don't learn anything new. If you don't already understand what the semantic web is, you won't be able to make sense of the author's high level descriptions and diagrams and you won't learn anything either. You can go to Wikipedia and probably get better explanations of most of the terminology. For example the Wikipedia definition of ontology from a computer science perspective is : "In computer science, an ontology is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them." Why can't the author just SAY that??? Instead he wanders all over the map with a kind of philosophical musing about ontologies, and then proceeds to dissect a human resources ontology without ever properly defining why this model is useful in terms of the semantic web and what makes this model an ontology in the first place. The whole book is like this.
The only reason I give it three stars is that there is useful albeit poorly organized information in here, and if you do know what the semantic web is and you have to present the information to management you can use the individual pieces of the book to probably stitch together a pretty good introductory presentation ... providing you already know what you are doing.
However, I really recommend the book "The Semantic Web Primer" instead. It is more technical and better organized with much clearer explanations.

Painstakingly, in a literal sense, read from cover to cover without learning much about semantic description and search (more pedestrian XML technologies, eg, XPath were covered well). Some of it, eg, on Topic Maps, is impenetrable. Very light on interesting and compelling usage and how-to of the more ambitious, semantic technologies that are the reason most would buy a book of this title.

And so, unfortunately, I agree with the negative assessments already given here: little practical information for implementers and on the contrary, the considerable time spent in attempts to decipher will not be justified, in my experience, with their pay off in knowledge that is useful or memorable.

To be fair, part of the problem, from what I gather by its absense in the book, is that the W3C semantic web technologies are not even attempting to solve any part of the ultimate problem of semantic analysis: natural language understanding. Instead the highest goal in this presentation is the /manual/ cataloging of /whole/ documents (and emails, customer questions, etc).

I think this is an important book because it covers an important topic. I only give it 3 stars however because it has two major flaws:

1) It is poorly organized
2) Two key sections (chapter 7 - Understanding Taxonomies and chapter 8 - Understanding Ontologies) are poorly written

With regards to the organization: the book talks a lot about taxonomies and ontologies, yet we don't get chapters on these until chapters 7 and 8 right at the end of the book. These chapters should be moved to the front.

Chapters 7 and 8, whilst they contain a lot of interesting information are very poorly written. The author relies far too much on hypothetical questions to introduce topics and then defer their discussion until later. This is just confusing. Also, the writing style relies on *extreme* use of parenthetical statements (like this). These parenthetical statements are often long and rambling, and you quickly loose any sense of the meaning that the author is trying to convey in the main sentence. This is really unfortunate and could have been corrected so easily by the editor. In fact, neither chapter 7 nor 8 seems to have been edited at all.

Chapter 8 just seems to peter out. After a discussion of ontologies, and frequent reference to OWL, we only get a couple of pages on it with no examples.
One is left at the end of the book with no real idea how the semantic web, taxonomies and ontologies may be used in practice within businesses.

Despite these faults, I would still reccommend this book to anyone as a useful starting off point for an investigation of the semantic web, taxonomies and ontologies. I look forward to future editions in the hope that the authors and editors can correct some of the problems.

This book's supposed survey of the field boils down to little more than some name-dropping of projects, some explanation of vocabulary, and some examples (none really enlightening), with no really useful explanation of how to do anything. It is a perfect example of how some people in the computer industry have perfected consultant-speak: the art of talking impressively and at length about a field without actually saying anything. And to add insult to uselessness, the book wasn't even adequately proof-read for typos.

This book can be a good general introduction to semantic web technologies, to get an idea about how they can be useful inside your organization. The starting and ending chapters are rather good in this respect.
But unfortunately the middle chapters, which try to explain the technical side in more detail, are somehow confused and hard to understand, maybe incomplete. The part about RDF is not bad and can give you some useful info, but things get worse when you get to topic maps and ontologies. Maybe this wasn't the main purpose of the book, but it's a waste of pages and reading time anyway.

So, when you finish reading it, you can be excited about the topic and have nice ideas for implementing those technologies in your work/life, but you still are left clueless regarding HOW you should actually do it.

It should also be noted that the book is becoming a little dated now: new technologies like OWL are more mature now, than what it describes. Not the authors' fault, of course.

Of the topics the subtitle says it covers (XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management), it's stronger on the Knowledge Management bit than on XML and Web Services. IMO it is a bit light on specific technologies and concepts used in the Semantic Web. This is especially true of Chapter 8, "Understanding Onotologies", which gives you a high-level definition of ontology (with detours like an introduction to logic systems and a discussion of directed graphs), but has only a very sketchy discussion of OWL, one of the important pieces of the Semantic Web. (The book does do a reasonable job explaining RDF, though).

This book is an excellent read : strong on substance without getting too complicated. The book does a good job of balancing the vision with the technology that is going on now. While this book does go into details (ontologies, taxonomies, XML technologies, RDF, web services, etc.), it does it in such a way that it is easy to understand. It is good in that there are some chapters that are geared towards businessmen (CTOs), and others geared for the more technical.

Don't think that you can read it all in one sitting, though. I just finished it, but I will probably need to re-read some of the chapters (the chapter on ontologies is very good, but is a lot to digest). I enjoyed this book immensely. Other books I have seen on this subject are way too difficult to understand.

This book is a must-read for anyone, including researcher, developer or CXO who is involved or plans to be involved with Semantic Web. Although, I have been involved with related technologies, namely ontology engineering since the late 80s, I could not put this book down until I finished it cover to cover. The breadth and depth of the subjects discussed are fabulous and was a great refresher for me on how technologies such as web services, XML, RDF and ontologies tie together. What most people do not realize is that technologically, we are ready for the semantic web. It is just as matter of time before everyone in the Internet industry realize the value of this technology and start a new gold rush towards providing the tools and products that will make it possible for machines to talk to other machines in a semantic web of programs that will expand corporate intranets, extranets and ultimately the Internet.

The examples the authors use are very helpful and to the point. In addition, the authors do a great job in identifying what is out there already and how it all fits together.

This book is timely on the market. The importance of introducing semantics into a Java Web Services Architecture is important. The authors did a great job of explaining the problem space for freshers as well as those with experience.

Simply put, buy this book.