Rating: 
Summary: Timely, thoughtful and illuminating
Review: I highly recommend this book for readers looking for a firm foundation in Semantic Web terminology and concepts. I found it to be a solid reference book because I keep coming back to it as I research further and develop my skills. My recommendation is to study the book carefully and then keep it close as you discover and monitor the vast amount of information available on the web itself. The level of detail in this guide is just right for printed material. It is deeper and richer than just an overview presentation, yet not too deep in implementation details - that would make the book quickly out of date anyway. There are many tutorials and implementation guides on the web, but it is difficult to make sense of them without a solid foundation. This book is designed to give the reader a good foundation of understanding. (This is why six out of nine chapters begin with the word "Understanding...") My favorite chapters are:
Chapter 1: What is the Semantic Web?
Chapter 2: The Business Case for the Semantic Web
Chapter 9: Crafting Your Company's Roadmap to the Semantic Web These chapters are well written and thoughtful. Executives and managers should study these three chapters thoroughly, and then refer back to Chapters 3 through 8 ("Understanding...") as they move on to other sources. One last accolade: I have not seen a printed guide that does a better job of listing references and hyperlinks throughout its pages. The appendix, which lists 121 very relevant sources, is alone worth the price of the book.
Rating:
Summary: Timely, thoughtful and illuminating
Review: I highly recommend this book for readers looking for a firm foundation in Semantic Web terminology and concepts. I found it to be a solid reference book because I keep coming back to it as I research further and develop my skills. My recommendation is to study the book carefully and then keep it close as you discover and monitor the vast amount of information available on the web itself. The level of detail in this guide is just right for printed material. It is deeper and richer than just an overview presentation, yet not too deep in implementation details - that would make the book quickly out of date anyway. There are many tutorials and implementation guides on the web, but it is difficult to make sense of them without a solid foundation. This book is designed to give the reader a good foundation of understanding. (This is why six out of nine chapters begin with the word "Understanding...") My favorite chapters are:
Chapter 1: What is the Semantic Web?
Chapter 2: The Business Case for the Semantic Web
Chapter 9: Crafting Your Company's Roadmap to the Semantic Web These chapters are well written and thoughtful. Executives and managers should study these three chapters thoroughly, and then refer back to Chapters 3 through 8 ("Understanding...") as they move on to other sources. One last accolade: I have not seen a printed guide that does a better job of listing references and hyperlinks throughout its pages. The appendix, which lists 121 very relevant sources, is alone worth the price of the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs to be reorganized and edited
Review: I think this is an important book because it covers an important topic. I only give it 3 stars however because it has two major flaws: 1) It is poorly organized
2) Two key sections (chapter 7 - Understanding Taxonomies and chapter 8 - Understanding Ontologies) are poorly written With regards to the organization: the book talks a lot about taxonomies and ontologies, yet we don't get chapters on these until chapters 7 and 8 right at the end of the book. These chapters should be moved to the front. Chapters 7 and 8, whilst they contain a lot of interesting information are very poorly written. The author relies far too much on hypothetical questions to introduce topics and then defer their discussion until later. This is just confusing. Also, the writing style relies on *extreme* use of parenthetical statements (like this). These parenthetical statements are often long and rambling, and you quickly loose any sense of the meaning that the author is trying to convey in the main sentence. This is really unfortunate and could have been corrected so easily by the editor. In fact, neither chapter 7 nor 8 seems to have been edited at all. Chapter 8 just seems to peter out. After a discussion of ontologies, and frequent reference to OWL, we only get a couple of pages on it with no examples.
One is left at the end of the book with no real idea how the semantic web, taxonomies and ontologies may be used in practice within businesses. Despite these faults, I would still reccommend this book to anyone as a useful starting off point for an investigation of the semantic web, taxonomies and ontologies. I look forward to future editions in the hope that the authors and editors can correct some of the problems.
Rating: 
Summary: Superficial and shallow book with little content
Review: If you find yourself falling behind with the latest technologies mentioned in tech articles on the web and published in the latest tech rags then this book will get you up to speed. This book gives a solid explaination of the latest technologies and ties them all together to explain the momentum behind the semantic web. If you are a project manager, business developer or an architect looking to plot the technical strategy for the future of your project or company this book will help you make those decisions.
Rating:
Summary: Falling behind on the latest technologies... read this book!
Review: If you find yourself falling behind with the latest technologies mentioned in tech articles on the web and published in the latest tech rags then this book will get you up to speed. This book gives a solid explaination of the latest technologies and ties them all together to explain the momentum behind the semantic web. If you are a project manager, business developer or an architect looking to plot the technical strategy for the future of your project or company this book will help you make those decisions.
Rating: 
Summary: Mediocre at best
Review: Lots on XML, little on the Semantic Web. Not clear what audience the book is geared towards.
For managers the book is too heavy on the technical details of XML and XML Schema. For developers and architects who would actually want to implement a semantic application there is too little substance on ontologies, semantic web, semantic web services or OWL to be of any use.
Many chapters (and the book in general) are poorly organized. For a much better (and more practical) explanation of the key concepts check out the recently released "Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web".
Rating:
Summary: not actually much about the Semantic Web
Review: Of the topics the subtitle says it covers (XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management), it's stronger on the Knowledge Management bit than on XML and Web Services. IMO it is a bit light on specific technologies and concepts used in the Semantic Web. This is especially true of Chapter 8, "Understanding Onotologies", which gives you a high-level definition of ontology (with detours like an introduction to logic systems and a discussion of directed graphs), but has only a very sketchy discussion of OWL, one of the important pieces of the Semantic Web. (The book does do a reasonable job explaining RDF, though).
Rating:
Summary: The most complet guide to knowledge society
Review: This book is a must-read for anyone, including researcher, developer or CXO who is involved or plans to be involved with Semantic Web. Although, I have been involved with related technologies, namely ontology engineering since the late 80s, I could not put this book down until I finished it cover to cover. The breadth and depth of the subjects discussed are fabulous and was a great refresher for me on how technologies such as web services, XML, RDF and ontologies tie together. What most people do not realize is that technologically, we are ready for the semantic web. It is just as matter of time before everyone in the Internet industry realize the value of this technology and start a new gold rush towards providing the tools and products that will make it possible for machines to talk to other machines in a semantic web of programs that will expand corporate intranets, extranets and ultimately the Internet. The examples the authors use are very helpful and to the point. In addition, the authors do a great job in identifying what is out there already and how it all fits together.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent coverage
Review: This book is a must-read for anyone, including researcher, developer or CXO who is involved or plans to be involved with Semantic Web. Although, I have been involved with related technologies, namely ontology engineering since the late 80s, I could not put this book down until I finished it cover to cover. The breadth and depth of the subjects discussed are fabulous and was a great refresher for me on how technologies such as web services, XML, RDF and ontologies tie together. What most people do not realize is that technologically, we are ready for the semantic web. It is just as matter of time before everyone in the Internet industry realize the value of this technology and start a new gold rush towards providing the tools and products that will make it possible for machines to talk to other machines in a semantic web of programs that will expand corporate intranets, extranets and ultimately the Internet. The examples the authors use are very helpful and to the point. In addition, the authors do a great job in identifying what is out there already and how it all fits together.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This book is an excellent read : strong on substance without getting too complicated. The book does a good job of balancing the vision with the technology that is going on now. While this book does go into details (ontologies, taxonomies, XML technologies, RDF, web services, etc.), it does it in such a way that it is easy to understand. It is good in that there are some chapters that are geared towards businessmen (CTOs), and others geared for the more technical. Don't think that you can read it all in one sitting, though. I just finished it, but I will probably need to re-read some of the chapters (the chapter on ontologies is very good, but is a lot to digest). I enjoyed this book immensely. Other books I have seen on this subject are way too difficult to understand.
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