What do you think?
Rate this book
Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL
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 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.
• 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.
352 pages, Paperback
First published April 25, 2008
74 people are currently reading
237 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
March 2, 2009
Out of all of my books on the subject, this is the one you want to read first and read twice.
Unlike the other books, it takes you through real examples and is very hands on. If you had the Protoge editor in hand, this book, and a pot of coffee, you would rock in a day or two.
Update: The first edition is full of errors and they finally put up an Errata section on the web.
http://workingontologist.org/index.html
Unlike the other books, it takes you through real examples and is very hands on. If you had the Protoge editor in hand, this book, and a pot of coffee, you would rock in a day or two.
Update: The first edition is full of errors and they finally put up an Errata section on the web.
http://workingontologist.org/index.html
May 28, 2020
Useful, but not perfect. Not great for beginners. Thorough without feeling complete.
Chapters 14 and 15 on Modeling processes and best practices are the most useful bits -- this is what I was looking for when I bought the book!
I love Semantics, RDF, RDFS, OWL, SKOS, and use them at work, but finishing this book was a real chore. The text is fine, but could be 1/3 the size with some prose refactoring. I think more graphs and better graphs would have helped as well.
Chapters 14 and 15 on Modeling processes and best practices are the most useful bits -- this is what I was looking for when I bought the book!
I love Semantics, RDF, RDFS, OWL, SKOS, and use them at work, but finishing this book was a real chore. The text is fine, but could be 1/3 the size with some prose refactoring. I think more graphs and better graphs would have helped as well.
June 18, 2019
A very helpful introduction to RDF, which was especially helpful for someone like me who learns best from books. Lots of information that experienced practitioners might take for granted is presented in an accessible style that doesn't assume the reader is already familiar, which was much appreciated.
Books about web technology are a dangerous game, since the landscape shifts so quickly and there are so many variables and dependencies to local systems infrastructure, but all in all this is a great guide for someone who is trying to get a handle on the many technologies that support linked data for libraries, such as RDF. Anyone who is doing data modeling in RDF will need to also read the up-to-date W3C documentation on RDF and RDFS, as well as the documentation for whichever RDF serialization they locally implement and the namespaces/schemas they use, in order to have a workable knowledge base. As a foundation textbook for RDF core principles and modeling best practices in a variety of use cases, one could do much worse than this.
Books about web technology are a dangerous game, since the landscape shifts so quickly and there are so many variables and dependencies to local systems infrastructure, but all in all this is a great guide for someone who is trying to get a handle on the many technologies that support linked data for libraries, such as RDF. Anyone who is doing data modeling in RDF will need to also read the up-to-date W3C documentation on RDF and RDFS, as well as the documentation for whichever RDF serialization they locally implement and the namespaces/schemas they use, in order to have a workable knowledge base. As a foundation textbook for RDF core principles and modeling best practices in a variety of use cases, one could do much worse than this.
April 2, 2018
(This review applies to the 2nd printing of the 1st edition.) It is not easy to take a discussion of a potentially dry and technical subjects such as RDF, RDFS or OWL, and make them clear, interesting and engaging, but this book manages it (well, mostly in the case of OWL). This is a very high level of technical writing!
The place it falls down is in it examples it never actually shows any of how the resulting ontologies are used. The single most important thing about building any model is that it be useful for the purpose for which it is built, and without showing that final step, building ontologies looks like an intellectual game with no real world use. This book discusses various common modeling error, but leaves off what I suspect is one the most common -- the model is not actually useful to the organization building it.
The place it falls down is in it examples it never actually shows any of how the resulting ontologies are used. The single most important thing about building any model is that it be useful for the purpose for which it is built, and without showing that final step, building ontologies looks like an intellectual game with no real world use. This book discusses various common modeling error, but leaves off what I suspect is one the most common -- the model is not actually useful to the organization building it.
December 26, 2022
A bit dated. An Ontology, a way to describe a knowledge domain - a sort-of cross between a database schema and an ER diagram - is one of the mechanisms of the semantic web, the goal of which is to provide data standards for disparate domains such that queries in a language syntactically like SQL can span different originators of data. What is less clear is how the minefields of proprietary information are to be crossed.
July 21, 2023
Excellent overview of web ontologies. Something that I learned for work and that ultimately I came to the conclusion that it brings no value.
I'm torn, 5 star book, 2 star subject matter. So 4 stars?
I'm torn, 5 star book, 2 star subject matter. So 4 stars?
December 1, 2013
I've wanted to read this for a while, so when some semantic web stuff came up at work, I was happy for the excuse to pick it up. It does a good job of explaining many common RDFS and OWL constructs - a few patterns and the terms that these standards define, with their meaning. It works through examples and shows how particular predicates can be used and what they should be interpreted as meaning.
However, I think this book wasn't quite what I had been looking for. It's nice to know that this particular predicate enables this sort of inference, but how well are those inferences supported in actuality? I know it's system dependent, and therefore not in the scope of this book, but that's useful information. I guess there's just a lot of freedom inherent in these semantic web standards about how to actually represent information, and that's awesome. Knowing predicates to use, and how to set up OWL classes, is very useful, and described by this book, but I still feel like there are open questions, for me, about how, in practice to set up "my data". Maybe I'll find a way to make it part of work, so I can get paid while looking at it :)
However, I think this book wasn't quite what I had been looking for. It's nice to know that this particular predicate enables this sort of inference, but how well are those inferences supported in actuality? I know it's system dependent, and therefore not in the scope of this book, but that's useful information. I guess there's just a lot of freedom inherent in these semantic web standards about how to actually represent information, and that's awesome. Knowing predicates to use, and how to set up OWL classes, is very useful, and described by this book, but I still feel like there are open questions, for me, about how, in practice to set up "my data". Maybe I'll find a way to make it part of work, so I can get paid while looking at it :)
October 20, 2008
If you're interested in the semantic web, but are struggling to piece together the alphabet soup of acronyms and standards, then this is the book for you. I was in that position until I devoured this book. All my questions were answered (I now have twice as many questions, but they're new questions).
Overall, it's rare to find a 'text book' that is also a page turner, but this comes pretty close. The writing style is fluid and informative without being dry. The examples are understandable and sufficiently demonstrative to convey the concepts being discussed and the book is organized in a very progressive manner.
The only downside was the number of typos and grammar errors in the book. The rate seemed to increase from one every seven or eight pages in the first few chapters to almost every page in the last few chapters.
As I said, if this topic is something you want to learn about, then this book is definitely worth reading cover to cover.
Overall, it's rare to find a 'text book' that is also a page turner, but this comes pretty close. The writing style is fluid and informative without being dry. The examples are understandable and sufficiently demonstrative to convey the concepts being discussed and the book is organized in a very progressive manner.
The only downside was the number of typos and grammar errors in the book. The rate seemed to increase from one every seven or eight pages in the first few chapters to almost every page in the last few chapters.
As I said, if this topic is something you want to learn about, then this book is definitely worth reading cover to cover.
September 1, 2012
This book is excellent for any kind of beginners in Semantic Web even though the book title claims to be for the Ontologists. A decent amount of text is contributed in explaining about the elements in the Semantic Web stack. The sequential approach of introducing concepts with real world examples, makes it so very easy for the reader to build on his existing knowledge. It doesn't frighten you at any stage with the complexity of OWL constructs and I think that's where this book succeeds. You get the confidence to start on with your first ontology. Highly recommended for beginners and also for experienced professionals.
May 16, 2013
This is an excellent book to get started with the concepts of semantic web, not just for ontologists but anyone. Every other page has an example that help readers to comprehend the concepts with ease. The flow of topics is natural (Intro->RDF->Inferencing and querying->RDF-Plus->OWL), and the chapters like ch. 4 (Semantic Web application architecture), ch. 9 (Using RDFS-Plus in the wild) give a bird's eye view of the topics which help the reader to know which part of it is being discussed and how it fits in the whole picture. All in all, it is a very useful read.
June 5, 2017
Allemang has written precisely the book I needed to begin doing ontology modeling. He provides more detail than most shorter-format pieces (and excluding the all-too-familiar Pizza modeling exercise), while writing in prose that does not get lost in the technospeak that many standards documents employ. This book will be kept close at hand over the next few years, I'm sure, so that I can consult it as new subtleties of semantic modeling occur to me and I need more detail.
April 10, 2016
Very recommended book on this topic. Oriented on explain and not on write a tons of dumb notions.
Useful the "challenges" parts where the author propose and solve some typical problems in semantic modeling with standard modeling patterns.
The main example are available on the book site: http://workingontologist.org/
I read by now this book as a reference book reading specific chapters on the specific area I needed to study but I will read it cover to cover since I got a very good impression.
Useful the "challenges" parts where the author propose and solve some typical problems in semantic modeling with standard modeling patterns.
The main example are available on the book site: http://workingontologist.org/
I read by now this book as a reference book reading specific chapters on the specific area I needed to study but I will read it cover to cover since I got a very good impression.
October 19, 2015
During the first few chapters I was thinking modeling in OWL would be like writing to a relational database. Not so much. By the end of the book I became convinced that graph storage is a huge missing piece in our data storage needs, along with relational stored, big table, inverted indexes and key value stores.
October 30, 2009
This book really "gets it" in terms of relationship based modeling and constructing a model with inferencing in mind. Anyone who is modeling to leverage to true power of a graph model using W3C standards should read this.
May 7, 2010
I love the practical orientation of this book. Like any good example of this type, it covers many counter-intuitive colloquialisms that will make modeling in RDFS/OWL easier, including common patterns that will provide unexpected results.
July 4, 2008
Half way through. Very accessible. Learned about non-XML RDF. Will update this review when finished.
August 28, 2009
Great book for learning the basics and formats for Web services. I learned a lot from this book.
September 22, 2012
Excellent introductory overview.
October 30, 2013
The first couple chapters are the best introduction to the Semantic Web and Linked Data that I've read. The rest is essential reading for anyone doing this professionally.
April 22, 2014
I'm not a working ontologist, but I found this to be one of the most clearly written introductions to the semantic web and data modeling with RDF that I've read to date.
November 2, 2014
This is a good starting point for people interested in learning about the Semantic Web, and covers the major topics in a way that makes you think clearly about them.,
April 28, 2015
never finished it.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews