Before reviewing this volume, it is necessary to recall some key definitions for most readers. Defined as formal specifications of conceptualizations, ontologies are rooted in the history and architecture of web-based services. This category of metadata allows for the sharing of a common understanding between people, which defines the concepts and distributed heterogeneous applications that often (but not always) embed them. Concepts, relationships, individuals, and axioms make up the uniform resource identifiers (URIs) of an ontology. Once crafted, they can be used for semantic annotations and data interoperability, as well as knowledge assimilation and distribution.

But conceptualization is not an easy and creative process, and there may not be universal acceptance of the concepts, categorizations, or definitions, not to mention the attributes. While some narrow and stable domains may be prone to the design of accepted ontologies used on the web in these areas, the deployment of ontologies is far less likely in evolving/new fields, or fields with no consensus. This is where the subject of this book comes in: ontology usage analysis (OUA) deals with the evaluation, measures, and analysis of the actual use of ontologies on the web.

As there are very few approaches to OUA, a large part of the book (chapters 3 through 9) is devoted to related frameworks: an ontology usage analysis framework (OUSAF), an ontology usage network analysis framework (OUN-AF), empirical analysis of domain ontology usage (EMP-AF), quantitative analysis of domain ontology usage (QUA-AF), and a representative ontology usage ontology (U Ontology). The descriptions of these frameworks are in general very clear and well organized, with many illustrative examples and figures.

This is preceded by an excellent chapter 1, which includes examples from eHealth and the evolution of OUA for ontology developers, data consumers, and data publishers. Chapter 2 places OUA in the ontology development and deployment life cycle, and discusses the empirical analysis of ontologies and vocabularies from semantic web resource description framework (RDF) data.

Regrettably, the volume assumes that vocabularies must be RDF encoded, even in EMP-AF, while other more popular/portable schemes exist. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that web crawlers also rely on other data structures. The book includes an extensive table of contents; lists of acronyms, figures, and tables; and a single list of references. Unfortunately, an index that would allow users to navigate between the elements of the proposed frameworks is missing.

In summary, this is a very topical and well-constructed volume, useful for all categories of web service developers, as well as some domain specialists and standardization specialists. The publisher should consider publishing an index as an essential companion text.