A Semantic Web Primer (Cooperative Information Systems) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Readers will need a basic understanding of formal logic in order to get the most from this book. Also realize that some material, such as the discussion and presentation of monotonic and non-monotonic rules are still hotly contested in the semantic web community.
This book starts out with an excellent introduction in Chapter 1, titled "The Semantic Web Vision". It next begins building towards the basic elements of a semantic web by starting in familiar territory - structured web documents in XML. Many readers will be intimately familiar with this material, but I recommend reading it because the authors lay a solid foundation for subsequent chapters here.
The components and concepts of the topic are then covered in chapters devoted to:
- Describing Web Resources in RDF, which includes basic ideas, XML-based syntax, schema, and querying.
- Web Ontology Language (OWL), which introduces the OWL language, examples and future extensions. Appendix A contains Abstract OWL syntax, which augments this chapter.
- Logic and Inference, covers monotonic and non-monotonic rules, syntax, rule mark-up in XML and examples. This chapter will require an understanding of formal logic, and I also recommend additional research on the web regarding the debate about using non-monotonic rules, which has highly vocal proponents and detractors.
- Applications, a chapter of case studies from real companies, including Audi, and material on how semantic web concepts can be applied to E-learning, web services and other scenarios.
- Ontology Engineering (ontology is synonymous with taxonomy) using manual and semi-automatic methods. There is also an excellent discussion about reuse.
The web site that supports this book is rich in content that will not only augment the book, but greatly expand it. Each chapter has an associated page on the site containing PowerPoint presentations, PDF documents, and other material. The site also has a section for errata, problems and quizs if you are basing a course on this book, and additional links to resources related to the material in the book.

Click Here to see more reviews about: A Semantic Web Primer (Cooperative Information Systems)

The development of the Semantic Web, with machine-readable content, has the potential to revolutionize the World Wide Web and its use. A Semantic Web Primer provides an introduction and guide to this emerging field, describing its key ideas, languages, and technologies. Suitable for use as a textbook or for self-study by professionals, it concentrates on undergraduate-level fundamental concepts and techniques that will enable readers to proceed with building applications on their own. It includes exercises, project descriptions, and annotated references to relevant online materials. A Semantic Web Primer is the only available book on the Semantic Web to include a systematic treatment of the different languages (XML, RDF, OWL, and rules) and technologies (explicit metadata, ontologies, and logic and inference) that are central to Semantic Web development. The book also examines such crucial related topics as ontology engineering and application scenarios.After an introductory chapter, topics covered in succeeding chapters include XML and related technologies that support semantic interoperability; RDF and RDF Schema, the standard data model for machine-processable semantics; and OWL, the W3C-approved standard for a Web ontology language more extensive than RDF Schema; rules, both monotonic and nonmonotonic, in the framework of the Semantic Web; selected application domains and how the Semantic Web would benefit them; the development of ontology-based systems; and current debates on key issues and predictions for the future.

Click here for more information about A Semantic Web Primer (Cooperative Information Systems)

Read More...

A Semantic Web Primer (Cooperative Information Systems series) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
If you've read about the basics of the semantic web online, you won't get much more from this book. There's only 6 pages devoted to SPARQL, and no mention of RDFa. Later chapters (especially "Ontology Engineering") are thin and weak. You learn the dirt basics, but not how to build anything meaningful with it.

Click Here to see more reviews about: A Semantic Web Primer (Cooperative Information Systems series)

The development of the Semantic Web, with machine-readable content, hasthe potential to revolutionize the World Wide Web and its use. A Semantic Web Primerprovides an introduction and guide to this still emerging field, describing its keyideas, languages, and technologies. Suitable for use as a textbook or for self-studyby professionals, it concentrates on undergraduate-level fundamental concepts andtechniques that will enable readers to proceed with building applications on theirown and includes exercises, project descriptions, and annotated references torelevant online materials. A Semantic Web Primer provides a systematic treatment ofthe different languages (XML, RDF, OWL, and rules) and technologies (explicitmetadata, ontologies, and logic and inference) that are central to Semantic Webdevelopment as well as such crucial related topics as ontology engineering andapplication scenarios. This substantially revised and updated second editionreflects recent developments in the field, covering new application areas and tools.The new material includes a discussion of such topics as SPARQL as the RDF querylanguage; OWL DLP and its interesting practical and theoretical properties; the SWRLlanguage (in the chapter on rules); OWL-S (on which the discussion of Web servicesis now based). The new final chapter considers the state of the art of the fieldtoday, captures ongoing discussions, and outlines the most challenging issues facingthe Semantic Web in the future. Supplementary materials, including slides, onlineversions of many of the code fragments in the book, and links to further reading,can be found at http://www.semanticwebprimer.org.Grigoris Antoniou is Professor atthe Institute for Computer Science, FORTH (Foundation for Research andTechnology-Hellas), Heraklion, Greece. Frank van Harmelen is Professor in theDepartment of Artificial Intelligence at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, theNetherlands.

Click here for more information about A Semantic Web Primer (Cooperative Information Systems series)

Read More...

Algorithms of the Intelligent Web Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I have always had an interest in AI, machine learning, and data mining but I found the introductory books too mathematical and focused mostly on solving academic problems rather than real-world industrial problems. So, I was curious to see what this book was about.

I have read the book front-to-back (twice!) before I write this report. I started reading the electronic version a couple of months ago and read the paper print again over the weekend. This is the best practical book in machine learning that you can buy today -- period. All the examples are written in Java and all algorithms are explained in plain English. The writing style is superb! The book was written by one author (Marmanis) while the other one (Babenko) contributed in the source code, so there are no gaps in the narrative; it is engaging, pleasant, and fluent. The author leads the reader from the very introductory concepts to some fairly advanced topics. Some of the topics are covered in the book and some are left as an exercise at the end of each chapter (there is a "To Do" section, which was a wonderful idea!). I did not like some of the figures (they were probably made by the authors not an artist) but this was only a minor aesthetic inconvenience.
The book covers four cornerstones of machine learning and intelligence, i.e. intelligent search, recommendations, clustering, and classification. It also covers a subject that today you can find only in the academic literature, i.e. combination techniques. Combination techniques are very powerful and although the author presents the techniques in the context of classifiers, it is clear that the same can be done for ecommendations -- as the Bell Korr team did for the Netflix prize.
I work in a financial company and a number of people that I work with have PhD degrees in mathematics and computer science. I found the book so fascinating that I asked them to have a look. They had nothing but praise for this book. The consensus is that everything is explained in the simplest possible way, with clarity but without sacrificing accuracy. As one of them told me, this is a major step forward in teaching AI techniques and introducing the field to millions of developers around the world. Even for experts in the field and experienced software engineers, there are important insights in almost every chapter.
We had tried to write a software library, for a small project, that analyzes log files and assesses IT risk (e.g. probability of intrusion; preemptive alerts on application performance issues, and so on) based on Segaran's book "Programming collective intelligence". We spend about six weeks trying to find how to match what was in Segaran's book and what we wanted to do but we did not find the depth and clarity that was required. On top of that, Segaran used Python so the code had to be rewritten and things didn't quite work as expected! We are now using the code from Marmanis' book and our code analyzes apache and weblogic log files in order to assess risk! It just works! We wrote the code in one week! We would not have been able to succeed without reading this book.
Clearly, I am deeply impressed. This is an outstanding book; it was not just useful, it was inspiring! It is a "must have" book for every Java developer.
The content of the book includes:
* the PageRank algorithm; a content based algorithm similar to PageRank to which the author coined the term "DocRank" because it applies to Word, PDF, and other documents rather than Web pages; search improvements based on probabilistic methods (Naive Bayes); precision, recall, F1-score, and ROC curves;
* collaborative filtering as well as content based recommendations;
* k-means, ROCK, DBSCAN for clustering; the best explanation about the "curse of dimensionality" ever! I finally learned what this mystic term means!
* Bayesian classification; declarative programming (through the Drools rules engine); introduction to neural networks; decision trees
* Comparing and Combining classifiers: McNemar's test; Cochran'sQ test; F-test; Bagging; Boosting; general classifier ensembles
Buy it, read it, enjoy it, and use it!


Click Here to see more reviews about: Algorithms of the Intelligent Web


Web 2.0 applications provide a rich user experience, but the parts you can't see are just as important-and impressive. They use powerful techniques to process information intelligently and offer features based on patterns and relationships in data. Algorithms of the Intelligent Web shows readers how to use the same techniques employed by household names like Google Ad Sense, Netflix, and Amazon to transform raw data into actionable information.

Algorithms of the Intelligent Web is an example-driven blueprint for creating applications that collect, analyze, and act on the massive quantities of data users leave in their wake as they use the web. Readers learn to build Netflix-style recommendation engines, and how to apply the same techniques to social-networking sites. See how click-trace analysis can result in smarter ad rotations. All the examples are designed both to be reused and to illustrate a general technique- an algorithm-that applies to a broad range of scenarios.

As they work through the book's many examples, readers learn about recommendation systems, search and ranking, automatic grouping of similar objects, classification of objects, forecasting models, and autonomous agents. They also become familiar with a large number of open-source libraries and SDKs, and freely available APIs from the hottest sites on the internet, such as Facebook, Google, eBay, and Yahoo.

Click here for more information about Algorithms of the Intelligent Web

Read More...