Liyang YuRecensioni

This is a very solid introduction to the world of semantic web for developers who need a practical guide. Even if you did not encounter the concepts related to the semantic web, you will not have any trouble because the author gently introduces every concept and provides you with practical examples and justifications. After having read the first half of the book you'll have a very good grasp of RDF, RDFS, N3, OWL, SPARQL, FOAF, Linked Data and other underlying concepts and technologies. But the story does not end there, in the second part of the book you'll proceed to develop concrete Semantic Web applications using established semantic frameworks such as Jena. You will also have learned how to utilize the most important semantic linked data resources such as DBpedia. The author shows a lot of examples with accompanying source code and does not refrain from explaining the intricate parts of the code as well as pointing out potential improvements and pitfalls in real life scenarios.

I would be willing to give the book five stars if only a little more care were taken in its editing. I'd expect a better proofreading from Springer editors. And even though lots of references are provided within the text it would be good to have a references or bibliography section at the end of the book. I was also surprised because the author never mentioned AllegroGraph, an important player in the field of graph databases / RDF stores.

My conclusion is that if you are going to read only one book for semantic web then it should be this book.½