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12 of 13 found the following review helpful:
 Mediocre at bestAug 18, 2004
By David Moore
Lots on XML, little on the Semantic Web. Not clear what audience the book is geared towards.
For managers the book is too heavy on the technical details of XML and XML Schema. For developers and architects who would actually want to implement a semantic application there is too little substance on ontologies, semantic web, semantic web services or OWL to be of any use.
Many chapters (and the book in general) are poorly organized. For a much better (and more practical) explanation of the key concepts check out the recently released "Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web".
8 of 8 found the following review helpful:
 Too high-level and dated to be very usefulMay 20, 2006
By calvinnme
The book throws around all of the right buzzwords: ontologies, XML, KIF, taxonomies, metadata, etc. However, it never even properly defines these terms or organizes the information. If you already understand what the semantic web is, the book makes perfect sense but you don't learn anything new. If you don't already understand what the semantic web is, you won't be able to make sense of the author's high level descriptions and diagrams and you won't learn anything either. You can go to Wikipedia and probably get better explanations of most of the terminology. For example the Wikipedia definition of ontology from a computer science perspective is : "In computer science, an ontology is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them." Why can't the author just SAY that??? Instead he wanders all over the map with a kind of philosophical musing about ontologies, and then proceeds to dissect a human resources ontology without ever properly defining why this model is useful in terms of the semantic web and what makes this model an ontology in the first place. The whole book is like this.
The only reason I give it three stars is that there is useful albeit poorly organized information in here, and if you do know what the semantic web is and you have to present the information to management you can use the individual pieces of the book to probably stitch together a pretty good introductory presentation ... providing you already know what you are doing.
However, I really recommend the book "The Semantic Web Primer" instead. It is more technical and better organized with much clearer explanations.
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
low signal to noiseAug 26, 2005
By George Herson
"web programmer"
Painstakingly, in a literal sense, read from cover to cover without learning much about semantic description and search (more pedestrian XML technologies, eg, XPath were covered well). Some of it, eg, on Topic Maps, is impenetrable. Very light on interesting and compelling usage and how-to of the more ambitious, semantic technologies that are the reason most would buy a book of this title.
And so, unfortunately, I agree with the negative assessments already given here: little practical information for implementers and on the contrary, the considerable time spent in attempts to decipher will not be justified, in my experience, with their pay off in knowledge that is useful or memorable.
To be fair, part of the problem, from what I gather by its absense in the book, is that the W3C semantic web technologies are not even attempting to solve any part of the ultimate problem of semantic analysis: natural language understanding. Instead the highest goal in this presentation is the /manual/ cataloging of /whole/ documents (and emails, customer questions, etc).
7 of 8 found the following review helpful:
Needs to be reorganized and editedAug 08, 2003
I think this is an important book because it covers an important topic. I only give it 3 stars however because it has two major flaws:1) It is poorly organized
2) Two key sections (chapter 7 - Understanding Taxonomies and chapter 8 - Understanding Ontologies) are poorly written With regards to the organization: the book talks a lot about taxonomies and ontologies, yet we don't get chapters on these until chapters 7 and 8 right at the end of the book. These chapters should be moved to the front. Chapters 7 and 8, whilst they contain a lot of interesting information are very poorly written. The author relies far too much on hypothetical questions to introduce topics and then defer their discussion until later. This is just confusing. Also, the writing style relies on *extreme* use of parenthetical statements (like this). These parenthetical statements are often long and rambling, and you quickly loose any sense of the meaning that the author is trying to convey in the main sentence. This is really unfortunate and could have been corrected so easily by the editor. In fact, neither chapter 7 nor 8 seems to have been edited at all. Chapter 8 just seems to peter out. After a discussion of ontologies, and frequent reference to OWL, we only get a couple of pages on it with no examples.
One is left at the end of the book with no real idea how the semantic web, taxonomies and ontologies may be used in practice within businesses. Despite these faults, I would still reccommend this book to anyone as a useful starting off point for an investigation of the semantic web, taxonomies and ontologies. I look forward to future editions in the hope that the authors and editors can correct some of the problems.
12 of 15 found the following review helpful:
 Don't waste your money on this bookJun 02, 2004
This book's supposed survey of the field boils down to little more than some name-dropping of projects, some explanation of vocabulary, and some examples (none really enlightening), with no really useful explanation of how to do anything. It is a perfect example of how some people in the computer industry have perfected consultant-speak: the art of talking impressively and at length about a field without actually saying anything. And to add insult to uselessness, the book wasn't even adequately proof-read for typos.
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