Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential (Hardcover)

by Dieter Fensel (Editor), Wolfgang Wahlster (Author), Henry Lieberman (Author), James Hendler (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"If you're a technical communicator who works with the World Wide Web (WWW) and would like a glimpse into the Web's future, this collection of articles by Web gurus is for you."
— Colleen Jones, Technical Communication

Product Description
As the World Wide Web continues to expand, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to obtain information efficiently. Because most search engines read format languages such as HTML or SGML, search results reflect formatting tags more than actual page content, which is expressed in natural language. Spinning the Semantic Web describes an exciting new type of hierarchy and standardization that will replace the current "web of links" with a "web of meaning." Using a flexible set of languages and tools, the Semantic Web will make all available information--display elements, metadata, services, images, and especially content--accessible. The result will be an immense repository of information accessible for a wide range of new applications. This first handbook for the Semantic Web covers, among other topics, software agents that can negotiate and collect information, markup languages that can tag many more types of information in a document, and knowledge systems that enable machines to read Web pages and determine their reliability. The truly interdisciplinary Semantic Web combines aspects of artificial intelligence, markup languages, natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, intelligent agents, and databases.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 392 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (November 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262062321
• ISBN-13: 978-0262062329
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 8.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,401,326 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Read!, June 7, 2004

By	Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract.com" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This book is relevant to all those who suspect "WWW" stands for "World Wide Wait." If you don't understand the Internet's shortcomings, just type "antidisestablishmentarianism" into the Google search engine and try to make sense of the 5,890 returns you get. Currently, there are three billion pages of information on the Internet, but within the next year that number will double. The question is how to manage the data while still increasing the functionality of the Web, continuing its transformation from a place where you "find something" to a place where you "do something." To accomplish those tasks, you have to go beyond "meta-tags" - those invisible headlines that tell search engines what any given page is really all about. This volume outlines the Semantic Web approach, which offers answers to those questions. A word of warning: this somewhat technical book will be of greatest interest to programmers, Web designers, specialists and motivated visionaries. We recommend it highly - if you fit into one of those categories.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Read!, October 15, 2003

By	Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract.com" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This book is relevant to all those who suspect "WWW" stands for "World Wide Wait." If you don't understand the Internet's shortcomings, just type "antidisestablishmentarianism" into the Google search engine and try to make sense of the 5,890 returns you get. Currently, there are three billion pages of information on the Internet, but within the next year that number will double. The question is how to manage the data while still increasing the functionality of the Web, continuing its transformation from a place where you "find something" to a place where you "do something." To accomplish those tasks, you have to go beyond "meta-tags" - those invisible headlines that tell search engines what any given page is really all about. This volume outlines the Semantic Web approach, which offers answers to those questions. A word of warning: this somewhat technical book will be of greatest interest to programmers, Web designers, specialists and motivated visionaries. We recommend it highly - if you fit into one of those categories.