Ontologies: A Silver Bullet for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce

Rating:
Summary: maybe no silver bullet, but still very important !
Review: I came across the rather negative reviews of this book and feel like I have to defend the work.

In my opinion this book really marks the starting point of what now became a large area of reserach and development under the title 'Semantic Web'. The author was the first one to elaborate and actually write down the idea of using semantic annotations to build better systems of the web. The fact that he mainly refers to the Ontobroker system is mainly due to the fact that at that there were almost no comparable systems around.

The importance of the book for the development of a semantic web becomes clear when we look at the last chapters. The description of the OIL language and the rational for its development foudn here can really be considered as the starting point for work on web ontology languages that is now even being supported by W3C.

Summarizing I think that this books marks an important step in the development of the Semantic web. Some of the content may be outdated by now, but this is a reason for me to say:

We are eagerly waiting for the next edition !

Rating:
Summary: Don't trust the title of this book
Review: If anything, this book confirms that ontology work is still very much confined to university labs.

It contains very little about ontologies (the 8-pages chapter 2, and a quick description of some ontology languages in chapter 6), and much about :
- the author's own "Ontobroker" research (Chapter 3)
- a presentation of e-commerce for those of us who have lived on a desert island in the past 5 years (chapter 4)
- a description of XML and XSL (chapter 5)

[The Price] is a [bit] steep price for 100 pages of information that is freely and easily available on the web.

Rating:
Summary: A must!
Review: Ontologies currently attract the attention of a broad group of communities -and rightly so. After the technies and the research groups, now business managers and those 'just interested in the evolution of the web' want to understand the meaning and the impact of ontologies on the information society. Not an easy audience for a comprehensible story with the right amount of depth, vision ànd real life examples.

This is exactly what Dieter Fensel has managed to do.

Inevitably, some chapters provide too many technical details for the one and too few for the other. Equally some e-commerce examples might be relevant for some, old news for others. But the reader is well guided through the book and can read the chapters relevant for him without missing the key messages.

As one of the first introductions in the conceptual framework and the applications of ontologies, the book is a must for anyone interested in the area.

Rating:
Summary: Good title, hasty content!
Review: The book leaves impression of a quickly put together text. It does contain important references and web pointers, but could have been much better. I am mildly dissapointed.

Rating:
Summary: A First Book on Web Enabled Ontologies-a Semantic Web Primer
Review: The emerging Semantic Web is the result of attempts to populate the web with content that has formal semantics. This enables agents to reason about web content and provide rational responses to unanticipated situations. It is well accepted that the sharing of ontological information is required in order to build the Semantic Web. This allows agents to share a partial understanding of the domain of discourse and still respond intelligently to requests. It has also been observed that the acceptance by the people outside the knowledge representation (KR) community is critical to the success of the Semantic Web.

Dieter Fensel provides the first pragmatic and comprehensive approach to using ontologies on the Web in his book "Ontologies: A Silver Bullet for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce". He presents one of the most exhaustive surveys of various ontology based knowledge representation techniques in light of their applicability to the web based information interchange.

Dieter Fensel examines the applicability of the two new web standards (RDF and XML) for machine understandable web data in constructing ontologies. He also discusses first order predicate logic languages (CycL and KIF), frame based logic languages (Ontolingua and Frame Logic) and Description Logic.

The book holds appeal both to those within and outside the knowledge representation community. Application of ontologies in the two popular areas of knowledge management and E-commerce are presented here. It is a must read for someone trying to get started in the study of the Semantic Web.

Rating:
Summary: Abstractions made practical
Review: The Semantic Web and knowledge management converge in this book by Dieter Fensel. Ontologies, a term from philosophy referring to the types and classifications of things that exist, recently has become a term of art in the area of business technology design. This book systematically introduces the idea of ontologies and shows clearly and in detail how to apply this conceptual framework for enhanced Internet-based e-commerce and improved Intranet retrieval of corporate information and knowledge. The notion of ontologies first gained acceptance outside philosophical circles among those working on the Semantic Web as a means to enable agents to reason about Web content and provide sensible responses to unanticipated situations. Fensel provides a thorough survey of a range of ontology-based knowledge representation techniques in terms of their applicability to Web-based information exchange. While the first part of the book will be accessible to non-experts interest in the use of ontologies in e-commerce and knowledge management, the second part presents a more technical view on emerging Web standards.

Rating:
Summary: Good title, hasty content!
Review: This book is the starting point for those readers who are willing to know what ontologies are and how they can be used for building ontology-based applications for Knowledge Management, electronic commerce and the semantic web. He has presented the key technology for building such kind of applications and relevant scientific contributions on the ontology field that are considered as important milestones (i.e., Ontobroker and OIL language).

Hence, I consider this book as an excellent introduction to those readers that don't know about ontologies and the semantic web. I very enjoyed reading the book and got many new inspirations.

Rating:
Summary: inconsistent and expensive
Review: This book is, as someone above said very hastily written. It repeats itself, and has a tacky structure, despite its 138 pages (references included). With that in mind, the price is quite hefty. but there are lots of references, which is a plus. There must be better books or papers out there which introduces ontologies.

Rating:
Summary: Beware the Hype
Review: What I liked:
This book is a good introduction to its subject, with an overview of ontology "standards" and commercial applications. That's why I bought it.

But...
It was completed in August of 2000, and so was published before reality set in on the many technologies and companies used as case studies here. I feel that I should have known to avoid a book claiming to reveal the "silver bullet" for KM and e-commerce. I already knew from first-hand experience that there is no such thing. (That is my experience-based bias.)

Fensel is guilty of the worst of the hype that was common during the e-commerce boom. For example, in naming companies who have brought ontology-related products or services to market he repeatedly cites revenue and market size numbers which have no bearing or relevance on the quality of the technology or applications (but only on the extent of the hype and the ignorance).

The companies and on-line marketplaces cited here are either a small shell of their former selves, or are gone completely. The many ontology "standards" cited are not standard at all, but just proposed standards which have few if any viable commercial applications.

The reality is that ontologies and semantic technologies in general are still very hard to deploy successfully -- and it will likely remain that way for some time to come. It appears as if ontology standards activity has stopped. (As of April 2002 for example, the ontology.org site hasn't been updated since August of 2000.)

The book is short and does not cover the subject in much detail. Still, it provides an overview and perhaps a few ideas for those who are working hard on the long, slow path to successful deployment of technologies based on imbedded semantic knowledge.

There are no secrets to success in this book. I don't know what the opposite of a "silver bullet" is, but that is what you will find here.