Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL

by Dean Allemang, James Hendler

Overview

The promise of the Semantic Web to provide a universal medium to exchange data information and knowledge has been well publicized. There are many sources too for basic information on the extensions to the WWW that permit content to be expressed in natural language yet used by software agents to easily find, share and integrate information. Until now individuals engaged in creating ontologies-- formal descriptions of the concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain-- have had no sources beyond the technical standards documents. Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist transforms this information into the practical knowledge that programmers and subject domain experts need. Authors Allemang and Hendler begin with solutions to the basic problems, but don’t stop there: they demonstrate how to develop your own solutions to problems of increasing complexity and ensure that your skills will keep pace with the continued evolution of the Semantic Web.

• Provides practical information for all programmers and subject matter experts engaged in modeling data to fit the requirements of the Semantic Web.• De-emphasizes algorithms and proofs, focusing instead on real-world problems, creative solutions, and highly illustrative examples. • Presents detailed, ready-to-apply “recipes” for use in many specific situations.• Shows how to create new recipes from RDF, RDFS, and OWL constructs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780080558387
Publisher:	Elsevier Science
Publication date:	04/09/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Dean Allemang is the chief scientist at TopQuadrant, Inc.—the first company in the United States devoted to consulting, training, and products for the Semantic Web. He co-developed (with Professor Hendler) TopQuadrant’s successful Semantic Web training series, which he has been delivering on a regular basis since 2003. He has served as an invited expert on numerous international review boards, including a review of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute—the world’s largest Semantic Web research institute — and the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a collaboration between 10 pharmaceutical companies and the European Commission to set the roadmap for the pharmaceutical industry for the near future.
Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Senior Constellation Chair at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and has authored over 200 technical papers in the areas of artificial intelligence, Semantic Web, agent-based computing, and web science. One of the early developers of the Semantic Web, he is the Editor-in-Chief emeritus of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. In 2010, he was chosen as one of the 20 most innovative professors in America by Playboy magazine, Hendler currently serves as an "Internet Web Expert" for the U.S. government, providing guidance to the Data.gov project.

Table of Contents

1. What Is The Semantic Web?
2. Semantic Modeling
3. RDF – The Basis of the Semantic Web
4. Semantic Web Application Architecture
5. RDF And Inferencing
6. RDF Schema Language
7. RDFS-PLUS
8. Using RDFS-PLUS in the Wild
9. Basic OWL
10. Counting and Sets In OWL
11. Using OWL in the Wild
12. Good and Bad Modeling Practices
13. OWL Levels and Logic
14. Conclusions
15. Frequently Asked Questions

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

The bestselling practitioner’s guide to the semantic web, updated with the latest developments in technologies for building useful and reusable models and applications.

Editorial Reviews

"Overall, this book provides a thorough and cogent introduction to the semantic Web. Giving just enough philosophical background, the authors focus on the practical aspects of constructing data stores and applications. This blend of philosophy and practical descriptions leads the reader to anticipate how the standards of the semantic Web should work before the standards are described. As a result, the reader is likely to feel that the semantic Web works just as it should." —Computing Reviews

"Allemang, a scientist at a company that consults, trains, and provides products for the Semantic Web, and Hendler (computer and cognitive science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) explain how web developers who are practitioners in another field, such as health care, finance, engineering, national intelligence, and enterprise architecture, can model data to fit the requirements of the Semantic Web. They detail how to construct semantic models, with a focus on the use of RDF (Resource Description Framework), RDFS (RDF schema), and OWL (Web Ontology Language) to accomplish specific tasks and model data and domains. This edition has been updated to incorporate new technologies such as SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol And RDF Query Language), OWL 2.0, and SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System). They include examples of Quantities, Units, Dimensions, and Types (QUDT) and The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO), as well as examples of how to use the Semantic Web to solve common modeling problems and a FAQ section on challenges." —SciTech Book News

"Overall, this is an easy-to-follow guide to the basic concepts related to building semantic Web ontologies. The book flows well from chapter to chapter, and the many examples illustrate the different topics. For beginners, it’s an excellent introduction to the subject, which is exactly what the authors intended…" —Computing Reviews.com

From the Publisher