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Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist
I am really excited to see that Dean Allemang and Jim Hendler's book "Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist" is now available for pre-order on Amazon's web site. When I met Dean at Jazoon 2007 he let me have a peek at an early copy of this book[1]: it was exactly what I had been waiting a long time for. A very easy introduction to the Semantic Web and reasoning that does not start with the unnecessarily complex RDF/XML [2] but with the one-cannot-be-simpler triple structure of RDF, and through a series of practical examples brings the reader step by step to a full view of all of the tools in the Semantic Web stack, without a hitch, without a problem, fluidly. I was really impressed. Getting going in the Semantic Web is going to be a lot easier when this book is out. It should remove the serious problem current students are facing of having to find a way through a huge number of excellent but detailed specs, some of which are no longer relevant. One does not learn Java by reading the Java Virtual Machine specification or even the Java Language Specification. Those are excellent tools to use once one has read many of the excellent introductory books such as the unavoidable Java Tutorial or Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java. Dean Allemang and Jim Hendler's books are going to play the same role for the Semantic Web. Help get millions of people introduced to what has to be the most revolutionary development in computer science since the development of the web itself. Go and pre-order it. I am going to do this right now.
Notes
- the draft I looked at 9 months ago had introductions to ntriples, turtle, OWL explained via rules, SPARQL, some simple well known ontologies such as skos and foaf, and a lot more.
- The W3C has recently published a new RDF Primer in Turtle in recognition of the difficulty of getting going when the first step requires understanding RDF/XML.
Posted at 12:41PM Mar 19, 2008 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in SemWeb | Comments[3]
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Technically a dotted-pair is simpler than a triple ... ;-) anyways looking forward to the book.
Posted by Colm Kennedy on March 19, 2008 at 01:41 PM CET #
Thanks for the plug, Henry; it's exciting to actually see it on Amazon. They have a galley proof here at the DAMA conference this week - so I can actually hold it in my hands!
Posted by Dean Allemang on March 19, 2008 at 11:18 PM CET #
Posted by S is for Semantics on March 19, 2008 at 11:29 PM CET #