Customer Reviews

Towards the Semantic Web: Ontology-driven Knowledge Management

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This book often introduces terms with little or no meaning. In the early chapters, it refers to various ontologies assuming the reader knows terms like frames, slots, ...etc. Ex: pg. 18 "Class Defintion (frames) have an (optional) addtional field that specifies whether the class definition is primitive (a subsumption axiom) or a non-primitive (an equivalence axiom)." I was more confused after reading the definition. The book has very few diagrams and does not always realize how important it is for a reader to understand a fundamental concept before they go on to learning new concepts - which are based on solid fundamentals.
In later chapters, the case studies are helpful as one can start relating the myriad of concepts learned in previous chapters.
It is obvious that the authors know their stuff but their teaching style has a lot to be desired.

This books is nothing but just a compilation of papers persented by various researchers. You can just look at the table of contents of this book, search the paper on the internet and download it. Don't see the point in buying this book.

This book comprises a comprehensive overview of the application of semantic web technologies to knowledge management. The first few chapters discuss theoretical underpinnings before moving on to knowledge management tools that can exploit semantically-annotated information. A methodology is also described for the introduction of these technologies into an organisation, along with a couple of case studies. As such, it is one of the first books describing a whole-hearted attempt to apply semantic web technology to an important industrial/commercial area.

The book is not primarily an introductory text and is for people who already have at least an understanding of existing WWW technology and probably of XML and RDF. As such, I believe that its main appeal will be to graduate students; researchers, developers and technologists in industry; and the academic community. For this readership, this is an excellent text describing some ground-breaking research in the field, and giving pointers to the future research agenda.

This is a book about what has Ontoprise(in other words Karlsruhe Uni.) done in asocciation with Innsbruk and Amsterdam (and probably Manchester I cannot recall) for the development of software tools about the semantic web. That's why the title of the book has the word "Towards" before "Semantic Web" and it is not just called "The Semantic Web". It talks very little about the Semantic Web, Ontologies and the problems that we face in the realization of these concepts and is limited to just introducing some concepts without defining and explaining them in detail.
The only pesron that this book might seem usefull is someone who is prety aware of the semantic web and ontology technologies and wants to find more information about the way the way some problems are dealt in software.

Davies et al take us on a tour of a possible future Web. A very ambitious project, whose remit is to enable a far more automated knowledge processing of web pages. Various ontologies and schemas are proposed. Notably the RDF schema.

Overall, there is no dispute in the book that XML will be used as the default low level representation. It is the higher level issues that are cloudier. Much harder to evaluate. Like how to evolve a given ontology and how to couple this to a reasoning software package.

The book also finds time to look briefly at involving a peer-to-peer method for aiding knowledge management and for building ontologies. A so-called Knowledge Grid is proposed. Speculative but exciting.