Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #583271 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01
• Released on: 2005-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 302 pages

Customer Reviews

No better than reading the standards
You would learn more from the Protege OWL pizza tutorials.
The book has no discussion on inferencing or how to actually make an ontology with OWL.
The one example is simply a representation of the hours that a business is open. It could be expressed in plain RDF(S) and does not provide any indication of the power of OWL. For example, it directly specifies the hours for each day. A better example could define hours in terms of the type of day (weekday, weekend, holiday, Thanksgiving) and then infer the hours for each day.
The book uses unusual terminology holonymy, hyponymy, etc. (generalization and composition, respectively)
OWL forms only half the book with the remainder covering URLs, XML,RDF, RDFS. Removing that material would have allowed OWL to be covered in appropriate detail.
Only the XML/RDF serialization is described, which is only used for exchange between tools. There is no discussion of the abstract syntax, N3, Turtle, etc that all provide a more human readable serialization.

Be forewarned, amateur publishing has its drawbacks.
On a positive note, this book provided something I needed: a shallow overview of the various technologies comprising the semantic web, from which I can direct my own further in-depth study. After reading this book I will be less clueless in a water cooler conversation about OWL or RDF. For this reason I give it 3 stars and don't wish to trash it entirely.

However, from an instructional standpoint it largely fails to deliver. I had to skip over a great deal of unnecessarily pedantic "faux formal" prose which was useful mostly as sleeping aid. It is neither reference nor tutorial, and I will need further study before making even the simplest use of the technologies discussed. The examples are few, fragmented, and too simplistic to be of much help.

The publisher's note on the inside cover says "This book was published on demand in cooperation with Trafford Publishing." I'm not sure what _on demand_ publishing is all about, but it seems that the book was written and typeset in a word processor's outline mode. I like the idea of grassroots publishing, and I assume that this was a cost effective way for the author to quickly deliver material that is very much needed in the market. However, if you're used to finely crafted and entertaining O'Reilly books, then this one is a bit of a shock. I think the attention of a professional publisher would have produced a book that was easier and more entertaining to read, with a bit of narrative, and a great deal more substantial examples. Pretty text and effective illustrations wouldn't be such a bad thing either, although I mean no insult to whichever of the author's children drew the owl. On the whole, this is not a book that entices me to curl up in front of the fire after a long day to broaden my technical horizons.

Thorough, interesting, and well organized
OWL is a complicated language, no doubt about it. It uses layers upon layers upon layers to provide a way to describe "things" with all of the complexity that they have in "real life". Explaining a system this complicated can be difficult. I know; I do it for a living, myself. But Lee Lacy has managed to break OWL down into small enough pieces that you can begin to see how everything fits together. Kudos for a job well done!