Allemang has written precisely the book I needed to begin doing ontology modeling. He provides more detail than most shorter-format pieces (and excluding the all-too-familiar Pizza modeling exercise), while writing in prose that does not get lost in the technospeak that many standards documents employ. This book will be kept close at hand over the next few years, I'm sure, so that I can consult it as new subtleties of semantic modeling occur to me and I need more detail. ( )

I thought this book provided a very thorough introduction and practical guide to the Semantic Web from basics in RDF through advanced techniques with OWL. ( )

This is one of the best books I read on Semantic Web and its alternative title should be "The Most Gentle Introduction to the Semantic Web". Gentle indeed, but not in the sense of "semantic web for dummies".

One of the authors, Prof. James Hendler, is the co-author of *THE* article that introduced the concept of Semantic Web to the world (Scientific American Magazine, May 2001). Being an expert in a field and writing a top notch technical introduction that strikes a very good balance between utility and clarity do not necessarily go hand in hand, but in this particular case readers like me should consider themselves very lucky because this book is the perfect blend. Not only does it introduce and explain almost all of the concepts in a very clear and lively manner, but it is full of real-world examples. Being far from a dry technical introduction, the book shows "why"s of Semantic Web with "how"s of it.

At its current page count, it is only expected that the book avoids some implementation- and programming-related topics, but books such as "A Developer's Guide to the Semantic Web" can easily fill this gap. On the other hand, despite the abundance of books that jump into nitty gritty details of semantic web programming, the books that describe semantic modeling practices and kindly show the pitfalls of ontology design belong to a very rare species, and this fact alone is one of the reasons why I give five stars in this review.

One of the most original parts of the book is at the end: In a brief appendix, the authors give a list of the most frequently asked questions related to semantic web, modeling, ontology design, together with short answers and page number references for further explanations.

Creating a useful ontology for a real-world domain which can carry its weight and prove its utility in many different software applications is not something that can simply be mastered by reading this book, it takes lots of effort, trial and error. Nevertheless this book, in its updated second edition, is a very useful, thoughtful and elegant contribution to the growing literature of practical semantic web. ( )

I wanted more examples of actually modelliing for data, rather than the metadata. ( )

never finished it. ( )