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Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web Thomas B. Passin 2004 | 304 pages ISBN: 1932394206 |
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$39.95 | Softbound print book | |
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$20.00 | PDF ebook | |
Preface
In the mid-1990s, I happened upon the topic of conceptual graphs (CGs), which are a way to represent formal logic statements using diagrams. I was accustomed to entity-relationship (ER) modeling, and I was immediately fascinated by CGs because they seemed so expressive and natural, a tremendously useful extension of ER diagrams. Also, they had grown out of efforts to represent expression in natural language, and because of this it was easy to read off the contents of a graph in English. In 1999 I discovered topic maps, which instantly struck me as a simplified implementation of CGs, one that was well suited to hooking into the Web.
I had no project at work that justified my spending much time on these subjects, but I began to study them when I could and to introduce them to others. A year or two later, I started to come across mentions of RDF and then of the Semantic Web; I began to fit them into my mental picture, which by now included distributed databases and web applications, markup languages such as HTML and XML, and of course CGs and topic maps.
I found the Semantic Web the hardest of all to get a handle on, because it seemed to range from obvious extensions of what I already knew on the one extreme, to extremely complex and advanced integrations of logic, semantics, and artificial intelligence on the other. I now know that I was not the only one to become bewildered, yet fascinated, by the Semantic Web.
One other such person was Marjan Bace, publisher of Manning. The Semantic Web came up by chance during a phone conversation we had, and before I quite knew how it had come about, Manning had a new book project and I was off and running. At the time, I had no idea how demanding the work would be (although I thought I did) nor how long it would take (although I thought I did). The Semantic Web hooks into an enormous number of technologies and disciplines, and they all have to work together in complex and nonlinear ways. It is too much for a single person to know intimately, yet the author's job is to make it clear and understandable to the reader. That's what this book attempts to do: make this fascinating and complex subject clear, concise, and accessible.
DESCRIPTION
A complex set of extensions to the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web will make data and services more accessible to computers and useful to people. Some of these extensions are being deployed, and many are coming in the next years. This is the only book to explore the territory of the Semantic Web in a broad and conceptual manner.
This Guide acquaints you with the basic ideas and technologies of the Semantic Web, their roles and inter-relationships. The key areas covered include knowledge modeling (RDF, Topic Maps), ontology (OWL), agents (intelligent and otherwise), distributed trust and belief, "semantically-focused" search, and much more.
The book's basic, conceptual approach is accessible to readers with a wide range of backgrounds and interests. Important points are illustrated with diagrams and occasional markup fragments. As it explores the landscape it encounters an ever-surprising variety of novel ideas and unexpected links. The book is easy and fun to read - you may find it hard to put down.
The Semantic Web is coming. This is a guide to the basic concepts and technologies that will come with it.
Threads Explored
- Scenarios of use
- Semantic Web layering
- A society of agents
- Trust and belief
- The life of annotations
- Collective knowledge
- The challenge of information:
- incomplete
- erroneous
- conflicting
WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY ABOUT THIS BOOK...
Outstanding Academic Title for 2005
"A thorough look at one vision of the Web's future
…particularly well written...Highly recommended."
-- Choice Magazine
"I recommend this book to students, developers,
and researchers who are curious about the Semantic
Web, or who are looking for an upper-level viewpoint..."
-- Computing Reviews
ABOUT THE AUTHOR...
Thomas Passin is Principal Systems Engineer with Mitretek Systems, a non-profit systems and information engineering company. He has been involved in data modeling and created several complex database-backed web sites and also became engaged in a range of conceptual modeling approaches and graphical modeling technologies. He was a key member of a team that developed several demonstration XML-based web service applications, and worked on creating XML versions of draft standards originally written in ASN.1.
He graduated with a B. S. in physics from the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, then studied graduate-level physics at the University of Chicago. He became involved with XML-related work in 1998, with Topic Maps in 1999 and developed the open-source TM4JScript Javascript topic map engine.
Mr. Passin is the coauthor of the book Signal Processing in C. He lives in Reston, Virginia.