• Post Reply Bookmark Topic Watch Topic
  • New Topic
programming forums Java Mobile Certification Databases Caching Books Engineering Micro Controllers OS Languages Paradigms IDEs Build Tools Frameworks Application Servers Open Source This Site Careers Other Pie Elite all forums
this forum made possible by our volunteer staff, including ...
Marshals:
  • Campbell Ritchie
  • Jeanne Boyarsky
  • Ron McLeod
  • Paul Clapham
  • Liutauras Vilda
Sheriffs:
  • paul wheaton
  • Rob Spoor
  • Devaka Cooray
Saloon Keepers:
  • Stephan van Hulst
  • Tim Holloway
  • Carey Brown
  • Frits Walraven
  • Tim Moores
Bartenders:
  • Mikalai Zaikin

To author : Which Goal of This Book ?

 
Ranch Hand
Posts: 1312
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
Hi author,

I'm have some question to ask you.

1. Which Goal of This Book ?
2. This book useful for web/programmer/developer/manager/designer ??? who ?
 
author
Posts: 30
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
The Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web is written for people who are curious about the Semantic Web and its technologies, and want to know more about what it is and how the different technologies will likely work together. It is not a programming guide, but it could help one decide what approaches or technologies to focus on for moving into Semantic Web projects.
 
mister krabs
Posts: 13974
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
I guess this whole concept is sort of vague in my mind. Could you give us some examples of applications that you think could involve the semantic web. What is that someone would like to do that could be done easier using the semantic web?
 
Greenhorn
Posts: 1
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
Looks like a very good book. It is probably among the very few books which talks about the use of RDF/DAML in semantic web. With information about FIPA, topic maps in there I think the book contains info. about how the technologies for semantic web have evolved.

I had one question though:
Now that RDF/DAML/OWL (is it in there?) becoming standard for the modeling, the new widespread problem people are facing is versioning and comparison of the knowledge represented on the semantic web. There are many papers on versioning in ontologies but not much on how it can be generalized to semanticweb. Does your book touch on this aspect?
 
Tom Passin
author
Posts: 30
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
Let me respond to Sachin Oswal's question about versioning first. There has been a lot of discussion about versioning of ontologies on the RDF and Semantic Web lists in recent months. It is definitely a significant issue, and the answers are being worked on but not yet resolved. My book only touches on versioning and does not really get into it.

OWL does have provisions for specifying version information of sorts, both at the ontology level and at the class/property level. However, the semantics of these features is not specified in much detail. You can look at this part of one of the OWL recommendations for more detail -

http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-guide-20040210/#OntologyVersioning

However, versioning is only part of the story, and not the most complex part. Suppose that I decide to use a property from your ontology (as identified by its URI), but I extend its semantics. There is nothing to stop me from doing this. In this case, when someone else makes use of data that includes the property, whose semantics apply and how can they know? If I completely change or even reverse the meaning of your terms, does this require an RDF processor to revise its "understanding" of the data?

These kinds of questions are also being debated. As you can imagine, there are many points of view.

Of course, when you make use of RDF in a relatively closed system, where these kinds of things are not likely to happen, no problem. Also, these kinds of questions are not unique to RDF but will apply to any open system where things may be said about any resource by anyone.
 
Tom Passin
author
Posts: 30
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
Now let me speak to Thomas Paul's question about Semantic Web applications. It is not so easy to answer in a short space because many people have different ideas of the scope of the Semantic Web. Also, it depends on whether you are interested in the more futuristic (or optimistic) kinds of applications or something that could be done now or in the near future.

My book does have some application scenarios, and they are available on line in the first chapter, which can be downloaded from the publisher's web page for the book (see www.manning.com). That chapter also sketches out the range of notions of what the Semantic Web is supposed to be. Near the end of the book, I revisit the scenarios with a detailed discussion of each part of them in light of all the other material in the book.

To give some of the flavor, I will summarize parts of one of the book's scenarios. Suppose you are at a conference, and you meet a participant, Sam, who gives you his vcard information - like the vcard data that some people already attach to their emails - name, employer, email, etc. In the scenario, this data is automatically ingested by your semantic web-enhanced PDA.

At the end of the day, you review the day's events, and find that your PDA has found that Sam seems to be a good candidate for a job opening an another department at your company. It even offers to notify the right person back at the company. During the day, it seems, your PDA went to work and checked out everything it could find about Sam, and found a match between his background and the job requirements listed by your company.

You want to know why the PDA is making the suggestion, and it has a button to press asking for an explanation of the reasoning. It has another for more information. After you digest the explanations, you decide to go ahead and have the PDA give the information the the appropriate person (which it already knows).

There is much more to the book's scenarios, but this should give the idea. Ideally, there would be a fairly seamless integration of various ontologies (to allow the PDA the work with the terms it found), workflows (so the PDA would know it should scan for likely candidates, perhaps), discovery of semantically useful data, and reasoning to draw sensible conclusions and to be able to explain them.

That's the kind of picture that Semantic Web proponents have in mind.

Does this answer your question well enough? If not, please post back so I can know what the best direction to go.
 
Tom Passin
author
Posts: 30
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
To speak to another part of Thomas Paul's question - what could the Semantic Web help us do more easily? The idea is that there are a lot of things that we do on the web today that could be automated if only ... if only computers could understand the data better (HTML has to be read by people for much of its meaning to be available)... if only a software agent could act for you... if only searching could be smarter... and so on.

The Semantic web is really intended to increase the amount of help that computers can give us, to relieve us of some of the more time-consuming and mundane tasks, to handle details that require information (on the Web) that is currently implicit but not really available to software as things are now.
 
somkiat puisungnoen
Ranch Hand
Posts: 1312
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
Thank you for all answer.
 
reply
    Bookmark Topic Watch Topic
  • New Topic