Tom Heath

I'm going to violate one of my self-imposed rules and give this 5 stars even though I haven't re-read it yet. Of the various books and extended articles I've read about the Semantic Web, this may be the most useful from the "so what?" perspective. Yes, those of us who work in (or intend to work in) the SemWeb space need to understand ontologies and OWL and SPARQL, and there are other* books** that cover those topics more thoroughly than this book. But the point of the SemWeb isn't just to create nifty ontology models; it is to create and access data using web technology. And Heath's book gets into some of the nitty-gritty details about that in a way that no other book I've yet read does. It describes patterns of how to publish the data and how to consume linked data; what the conventions are for URIs and the underlying data files and directories; how to apply provenance metadata; and more. I don't know if this should be the first book you point a SemWeb novice towards, but it should almost certainly be the second.

*[b:Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist|12634495|Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist|Dean Allemang|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328013328s/12634495.jpg|17739635]
**[b:Learning SPARQL|12257144|Learning SPARQL|Bob DuCharme|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328761512s/12257144.jpg|17231892]… (altro)