Excellent content, minor production issues
4 stars
This is an excellent introduction to semantic web technologies that focuses on data modeling and use cases.
What I liked: Given the target audience of "working ontologists," this book hits the mark. The sequencing of material is logical: the topic is introduced well, using good motivating examples; then the technological details and data modeling principles are introduced such that each chapter builds on prior chapters. Also, the chapters that introduce new semantic web tools and techniques are interspersed with chapters containing extended examples and case studies, so the material is kept interesting, relevant, and well-paced.
Coming into this book, I was familiar with RDF and basic datalog-style inference capabilities, but I only had cursory exposure to RDFS, SHACL, SKOS, and OWL. Now, I have a good understanding of what these technologies are, how they are related, and how they can be used in a semantic web/knowledge graph project.
What could …
This is an excellent introduction to semantic web technologies that focuses on data modeling and use cases.
What I liked: Given the target audience of "working ontologists," this book hits the mark. The sequencing of material is logical: the topic is introduced well, using good motivating examples; then the technological details and data modeling principles are introduced such that each chapter builds on prior chapters. Also, the chapters that introduce new semantic web tools and techniques are interspersed with chapters containing extended examples and case studies, so the material is kept interesting, relevant, and well-paced.
Coming into this book, I was familiar with RDF and basic datalog-style inference capabilities, but I only had cursory exposure to RDFS, SHACL, SKOS, and OWL. Now, I have a good understanding of what these technologies are, how they are related, and how they can be used in a semantic web/knowledge graph project.
What could be improved: While the structure and content of the book are good, the low-level editing and production is lacking. There are quite a few typos and minor issues throughout the book, including a couple that are copy/pasted several times. There is also a place where a malformed typesetting directive made it into the book. Also on the topic of typesetting, some of the figures are significantly separated from the text that references them, and in one case, the figures got mis-numbered at some point in the chapter. That said, my main issues are with the production and not the content itself.