<pre>
Author/s : Kal Ahmed, Danny Ayers, Mark Birbeck, Jay Cousins, David Dodds, Mike
Harley, Joshua Lubell, Miloslav Nic, Daniel Rivers-Moore, Andrew Watt
Publisher : Wrox
Category : Other
Review by : Margarita Isayeva
Rating : 8 horseshoes</pre>
You're gonna love a book that dares to say that surrounding your data with angle brackets wont give them meaning. How to express meaning, so that computers could "understand" it, is what the book is about.
It is intended for a reader who needs to develop navigation/search systems for large volumes of information and accustoms with current state of affair in this field.
Three major projects that underlie "Semantic Web" initiative are described in details:
- RDF, a notation for describing information resources on the web;
- TopicMaps, a notation with similar purpose but different syntax;
- MDL (Meaning Definition Language), the most interesting project, in my opinion. Its mission is described as "to provide the link between structure and meaning". Here body of knowledge is formalized in "Object-Property-Association" terms with attached XPath expressions that locate the source of data in an underlying XML document. If the values are taken from standard vocabulary (trite example - ISO country codes), we are as close to making computers to "understand" data as it is realistically possible today. Practical applications include automatic meaning-preserving translations between XML documents and XSLT stylesheet generation for such transformations.
Other chapters describe various practical tasks, like parsing RDF format with SAX and MDF, and explore experimental ideas - automatic topic maps generation or using Schematron for data mining.
Overall, the book provides a good overview of most important emerging technologies and tools in the field, gives food for thought and inspiration for your own ideas.
More info at Amazon.com http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1861004516/javaranch rel="nofollow"> More info at Amazon.co.uk