Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL

Around 2003 I bought my first two books about the Semantic Web and RDF. The authors of these books managed to confuse me into believing that RDF is some XML standard for knowledge representation and they basically needed an entire book to explain how to force knowledge into XML. The technology looked so painful, ugly, and wrong that I quickly gave up. A year later I met someone who explained to me that RDF (and SW) is about serializing semantic networks into triples and that reading XML/RDF is actually only for masochists. Well, that was something I did understand and I've been playing and working with RDF even since.
The book by Dean and Jim is wonderful. XML/RDF is completely ignored and the book focuses on the things that you need to understand if you want to get into the Semantic Web. I'm recommending it to all our customers and I guess we real soon will need a second edition. I'm also looking forward to their next book: the Semantic Web for the Advanced Ontologist :-)

It used to be that the only books about the Semantic Web were either theoretical treatises requiring advanced mathematical training or marketing pep-rallies. Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist fills the gap in between by providing a down-to-earth description of this important technology, describing how it can be used to provide real business value.

Allemang and Hendler accomplish this without relying on a lot of mathematical mumbo-jumbo--the first mention of the confusing OWL 'species' doesn't come until Chapter 13. You can get a lot of work done before you even start to worry about the technical details of logic.

Parts of the book are accessible to a general audience, and the whole book is accessible to anyone with some sort of analytic background, not just logicians and computer scientists. This book has something for beginners (even if this is the first time you've heard of the semantic web) as well as for experienced practitioners.

There is a great need for a book like this, and the authors are well-credentialed, but unfortunately, this book is more like an introduction than a craftsman's resource. It reads like a first draft with typos, belabored repetitive text, and some odd examples. There is almost no discussion of internationalization, security, performance, or tricky basic types such as dates, times, or currency. More discussion of SPARQL would have been useful, as well as discussion of what should go in the model vs. what should be queried out. The chapter "Good and Bad Modeling Practices" was a particular let-down. A sharp, thoughtful, deeper book on this topic would really help the field.

Finally a book that explains the key aspects of the Semantic Web in easy to understand language, with well thought out examples and taking a step by step approach to this eminently stackable technology. No RDF/XML in the whole book! This will save all who get started on the semantic web years of work hunting down specs, and will give them the right initial intuitions.

A God send! Buy one for yourself and one for your friends too :-)