Book Review: Creating the Semantic Web with RDF

Book Author: Johan Hjelm

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN: 0-471-4059-1 Price: $49.99 (277 Pages)

If you ever wonder what the rest of the world is doing with the Internet, this book is for you. It’s really interesting to see that some of the most enterprising proponents of open source software and open standards based implementations can be found in Europe. It sort of makes you wonder if Linus Torvald could have ever succeeded had he been a student in the US.

Maybe it’s my European background that makes me a little prejudicial here, but it seems an awful lot of the interesting work that’s being done with such tools as PHP, Perl, MySQL and XML comes out of Europe. Perhaps it’s the distance from the home offices of IBM, Sun and Microsoft that is responsible. Or maybe US corporatios have a particular need to spend more money than necessary. Whatever the case maybe, when it comes to European applications and sites, I’ve seen interesting and mission critical software running on Linux; MySQL (which is produced by a Swedish company),PHP an using XML. My favorite XML editor is XML-Spy which originates in Austria.

If you haven’t heard of semantic web sites and RDF you are not alone. RDF stands for Resource Description Framework. Via the use of meta data, RDF can be utilized to describe the contents of a page in such a way as to make it tremendously more productive to its users. Through XML descriptors the pages of your web can be related to one another in a way that make navigating, searching and selecting from them much more precise than possible with just typical meta tags.

This is not a technology that will catch on in the various areas of the “classic Internet”. Instead the perfect utilization maybe found in an Intranet system of a large company. Someone like BOEING or Wells Fargo for example. A company that in and of itself represents a small universe of specific information that only pertain to itself is the best candidate for this tool.

“Creating the Semantic Web” is a fascinating read by a Senior Research Engineer at Ericsson Inc. - a gentleman who is a former member of the W3C and who lists Tim Berners-Lee on his acknowledgements as one of the driving forces behind this book. If your interested in doing something very unique, valuable and different with a web site, this book is for you.

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