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 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

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.