The Semantic Web for Knowledge and Data Management: Technologies and Practices

Citation

Schutte, M. (2009), "The Semantic Web for Knowledge and Data Management: Technologies and Practices", Online Information Review, Vol. 33 No. 3, pp. 621-623. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520910970059

When reading this book, one learns of the great improvements in the integration and interoperability of information systems made possible by semantic web (SW) technologies. Cardoso and Lytras explain in the preface that “the Semantic Web proposes the mark‐up or annotation of the content on the web using formal ontologies that structure underlying data for the purpose of comprehensive and transportable machine understanding”. Various researchers and practitioners have contributed to this title to enable the reader to understand the theories, tools and applications of semantics and ontologies. A central theme is how semantics can attend to issues of reuse, integration and interoperability.

Chapter 1 introduces the Inference Web explanation toolkit that supports the wide range of complex explanation tasks such as information extraction. These explanation solutions are required to attain the full potential of hybrid, distributed, intelligent web agents. The second chapter describes a framework that is a paradigm shift from the concept of a system of systems in favour of a federation of services model. The key challenges revolve around the discovery and selection of available services and making provision for differently defined vocabularies from different domains. Technology is proposed that can mediate between the service consumers and providers.

Chapter 3 looks at the most prominent personalisation techniques in the context of the SW. Comparisons of different approaches to architectural and engineering techniques are made, and key implementation concerns are highlighted. In Chapter 4 the authors propose a new model‐driven approach for SW application design. These applications have peculiar characteristics and software structures, and need specific methods and primitives for achieving good design results. Chapter 5 explores the potential of semantically processing monitoring data in industrial applications.

In Chapter 6 the authors put forward the notion of combining information extraction tools with knowledge representation tools to achieve semantic annotation and ontology population. This approach enables resources to be semantically tagged by metadata so that software agents can exploit them. Chapter 7 reveals the importance of distinguishing between permanent and transient mapping faults. A fault‐tolerant emergent semantics algorithm with the ability to resist transient semantic mapping faults is provided. Chapter 8 sets out a method to extract keywords from large‐scale bibliographic datasets by using the publications' metadata to build a taxonomy of topics, which in turn can be used to determine an author's area of expertise.

Chapter 9 discusses approaches to find, extract and structure information from natural language texts. Chapter 10 addresses the problem of converting a relational database into a normalised database schema. A new UML/OWL profile approach is suggested. Chapter 11 outlines an adaptive knowledge engineering methodology (RapidOWL) to lift the adaptive collaboration and communication patterns of social software and Web 2.0 towards a truly semantic collaboration. Chapter 12 presents the general vision of the social semantic desktop (SSD), the identified requirements and functionalities, as well as design of the standard SSD architecture. Chapter 13 describes the importance of, key issues and approaches for a practical, standard way of representing and reasoning with incomplete information. Chapter 14 suggests a SW software benchmarking methodology to provide objective results, improve quality and help identify best practices.

Students, researchers and practitioners will benefit from the discussions of key theoretical concepts combined with guidelines for practical application and implementation. The chapters are accompanied by sections on future research directions, additional reading and questions for discussion, making it an ideal resource for coming to grips with the latest developments.