Semantic Web Personalization and Context Awareness: Management of Personal Identities and Social Networking

Citation

Fourie, I. (2012), "Semantic Web Personalization and Context Awareness: Management of Personal Identities and Social Networking", Online Information Review, Vol. 36 No. 4, pp. 622-623. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521211254112

This compilation has been put together against the background of the growing importance of knowledge management (KM), as well as governments being forced to deal with knowledge services from larger parts of the global economy and society. It thus focuses on discussions of applications of semantics for empowering KM for better support of knowledge services for social networks, as well as success stories that show the power of semantics to improve on traditional KM and organisational learning approaches. These are captured in 13 chapters by a spectrum of international contributors from the USA, Spain, Italy, the UK, Brazil and Greece.

The 13 chapters address the following: transitioning a face‐to‐face class to an online class, standardisation of virtual objects, forum summarisation to support tutors and teachers in group interaction management, social networking and trust, the use of quantum agent‐based simulation to model social networks, an approach to a semantic recommender system for digital libraries, domain‐specific ontologies trading for retrieval and integration of information, technology engineering for NPD acceleration, locating doctors using social and semantic web technologies with regard to the MedFinder approach, re‐factoring and its application to ontologies, evolution in ontology‐based user modelling, collaborative filtering, and student models and distance education.

The function of Semantic Web Personalization and Context Awareness is well supported by the structure I have come to associate with books from Information Science Reference: a brief table of contents followed by a detailed table of contents giving the titles, authors and their affiliations as well as detailed abstracts. The book concludes with a very useful consolidated list of references from all chapters, a reasonable index and information about the authors. Many references to more recent publications can be spotted – something I would expect from a publication of this nature.

The spectrum of topics and level of writing fits well with the focus of the book as a reference text for those interested in the applied aspects of semantic web‐based personalisation in real world contexts, and those interested in exploiting semantics within knowledge‐intensive organisations such as policy makers, politicians, and academics.

This is an excellent text for reference and supporting research. Although the target audience is meant to range from students to practitioners, my opinion is that it can be recommended primarily for postgraduates and researchers. The style of writing and presentation, however, is not aimed at practitioners. If a non‐research, non‐academic audience needs to be reached, the editors might consider an additional manuscript in a different style and format.