more useful for making new documents

The Semantic Web is said to be the future of the Web. This book suggests how that might come about. It has extensive explanations of RDF and OWL, both overlaid on XML. One big idea is to move towards Web Services and to be able to compose these into more complex entities, in a programmatic manner. Another main hope is to be able to write future documents in RDF/OWL, that can be parsed and "understood" in a way not easily possible with conventional HTML documents.

Note that these future documents need not necessarily be published on the Web. You could have a bunch of them in a database.

Perhaps the most plausible use of the book is in designing these future documents. Sections in the book describe how to semi-automatically derive these from existing, non-RDF or OWL data. Like existing web pages. A hard task, if you want to find some kind of semantic meaning. This book might be considered part of the Artificial Intelligence field. But trying to tackle the general problem via the smaller step of building the Semantic Web.

Other Reviews

• State of the art
• more useful for making new documents