Semantic Web Engineering in the Knowledge Society

Citation

Schutte, M. (2010), "Semantic Web Engineering in the Knowledge Society", Online Information Review, Vol. 34 No. 2, pp. 353-354. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521011037089

This title showcases cutting‐edge research and experiments in using semantics, and ontologies, to give information well‐defined meaning with the aim of enabling seamless cooperation between computers and people. In 14 chapters researchers, scientists and practitioners present their findings and experience in the design, implementation and launch of Semantic Web applications. Conceptual frameworks and case study reports relate conclusions drawn from the latest research, while simultaneously sowing the seeds for future research and exploration.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the concept of Semantic Web applications and describes an inference web application toolkit that can provide support in a variety of tasks. Chapter 2 focuses on the industrial use of semantics and argues that the concept of a system of systems should give way to a new paradigm of a federation of services. Chapter 3 considers how well Semantic Web technologies can be applied to various personalisation applications. Chapter 4 covers importing and querying ontologies.

Chapter 5 gives an account of the potential of semantically processing monitoring data in industrial applications, with special reference to the design and prototype implementation of a decision support system in the railway domain. Special attention is paid to ontology engineering, system architecture and lessons learned during this project. Chapter 6 argues for the combination of information extraction tools with knowledge representation tools in the parallel tasks of semantic annotation and ontology population.

Chapter 7 highlights the importance of differentiating between permanent and transient semantic mapping faults, and Chapter 8 promotes the benefits of using semantics for analysing collaboration networks in a bibliography set, showing how this method can be used to determine authors' fields of expertise.

Chapter 9 illustrates how semantic approaches can be used to find, extract and structure information from natural language texts on the web, and Chapter 10 offers a detailed example of a solution to the problem of converting legacy relational databases into normalised database schema.

Chapter 11 focuses on social software and Web 2.0, showing how these concepts can be applied in an adaptive knowledge engineering methodology to enhance truly semantic collaboration. Chapter 12 presents the design of a standard social semantic desktop together with an ontology pyramid developed to support it. The chapter provides detail on architecture, implementation and engineering principles, as well as some technical challenges that were experienced during the development process.

Chapter 13 deals with the interesting concept of uncertainty representation and reasoning for the Semantic Web. The final chapter stresses the importance of having a benchmarking methodology in place to evaluate Semantic Web applications and technologies.

Of the chapters, 11 contain “Questions for Discussion” appendices, which make the book useful as a handbook for advanced computer studies. This is a versatile reference for academics, senior students, researchers and practitioners who are interested in exploring the solutions made possible by Semantic Web technologies and applications.