Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web by Thomas B. Passin

[Book Review Team]

<pre>Author/s : Thomas B. Passin
Publisher : Manning
Category : Other
Review by : Dirk Schreckmann
Rating : 9 horseshoes</pre>
Curious about the future of the web? Interested for ideas on what the web will be able to do and how it will be doing it? Curious about the technologies being used to develop the semantic web? Looking for ideas from future technologies that you can apply and use today in your applications? Want to know just what the heck the Semantic Web is all about? In easy-to-read, clear, not-over-your-head technical descriptions, Thomas B. Passin's "Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web" answers those questions, and more.

If the Semantic Web is mostly a new topic for you, as it was for me before reading this book, Passin's book provides a strong base of knowledge and understanding of the emerging Semantic Web concepts and technologies, including describing data with RDF, navigating information with topic maps, annotation, searching, ontology, semantic web services and intelligent agents.

If you're already quite familiar with the Semantic Web and the technologies behind it, while this book might help you to develop a more complete picture of how the technologies and ideas work into the bigger picture, you may prefer a more technical book with larger, more detailed descriptions and examples.


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[Book Review Team]

<pre>Author/s : Thomas B. Passin
Publisher : Manning
Category : Other
Review by : Valentin Crettaz
Rating : 9 horseshoes</pre>
Human beings have been working with the current incarnation of the world wide web for over twenty years now. Over time, the web has evolved from a network of strongly static pages into some highly dynamic and distributed information system. However, most of the information available on the web is targeted exclusively at humans. Computers still have a hard time "understanding" the meaning of information without proper human intervention. This is the gap the Semantic Web initiative is trying to bridge under the leadership of the W3C.

This book provides an excellent exploratory and speculative essay on what the Semantic Web could/will be given the current state of the different technologies that together will help build tomorrow's web. It also features brief, yet attractive and very well written, primers on RDF and topic maps as well as some advanced explorations on web page annotations, ontologies, logic, web services, distributed trusting and software agents.

It is worth noting that this book does not contain any single line of code, merely some RDF excerpts. It is thus specifically targeted at people willing to share the author's futuristic visions on the Semantic Web than hardcore programmers in bad need of a code indigestion. For the latter, the author provides some helpful piece of advice on how to contribute to the Semantic Web movement as well as an extensive list of references to follow if they want to drill down some topics in more depths. Definitely a great reading!!


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[Book Review Team]

<pre>Author/s : Thomas B. Passin
Publisher : Manning
Category : Other
Review by : Thomas Paul
Rating : 7 horseshoes</pre>

The semantic web is a web that can be intelligently used by computers. There are two things you need to know about the semantic web. First, it doesn't exist. Second, it may never exist. If this isn't enough information for you, and you want to look at what the future may hold for an intelligent web, then I can't think of a better way to get an introduction to the technologies that may be part of the semantic web than by reading this book.

The author examines each layer of the semantic web as proposed by the W3C. RDF is the potential meta-data language of the semantic web and the author makes it clear and understandable. The next chapter delves into ontology which is less clearly defined. The chapter on web services seems a bit unnecessary except as how they fit into the semantic web. A chapter on how intelligent agents may work is included. The last section deals with how information may be verified for truthfulness and authenticity.

If you are interested in RDF then you may want this book just for that section. If you are interested in what the semantic web might look like then this book may be of interest. This is an explorer's guide for those wishing to tread into unknown waters. This part of the web is uncharted but this book will help you learn what technologies may be used to fill in the missing pieces of the map.


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