A continuing issue with actualizing the promises of Tim Berners-Lee’s idea of the semantic Web [1] has been twofold. Initially, there was a lack of standards and practical tools around the domain, which the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and early adopters have addressed over the past decade or so. More recently, the barrier has been the lack of accessible written works that explain the intent, related standards, tools, and best practices for implementing semantic Web technologies and infrastructure. Although there are many thousands of works covering the semantic Web, many of these are either domain-specific or somewhat too technical for readers new to these concepts. This updated edition represents a step in the right direction toward addressing this latter barrier, which has developed since the first edition was published [2].

In this fairly concise volume, the authors present a progressive introduction to the topic, and the various technology standards associated with it, that is appropriately accessible to the novice. The third edition has been extensively updated throughout, including the handling of the various technologies in this rapidly developing field. Other new features include a chapter on the new Web ontology language 2 (OWL2) W3C standard and associated rules; updated coverage of the resource description framework (RDF) with the release of RDFa; and expanded coverage of SPARQL, the rule interchange format (RIF), and related application areas. Each chapter provides useful pointers for further investigation and reading--a helpful way to keep the page count down.

The book is appropriately technical in its descriptions and examples, and chapters 6, “Applications,” and 7 “Ontology Engineering,” will help the reader pull these technologies together with a series of application examples from a number of different domains. This empowers the user by tackling the issue of ontology creation and customization. Appendix A provides Extensible Markup Language (XML) essentials.

I recommend this book.