Book review – Semantic Web

The July, 2015 issue of Choice Magazine published my review of the following book. Since many readers of this blog do not typically have access to that magazine, I am placing a copy of my review here. I do not recommend this book. It is an example of a book which has not been updated in quite some time. While it may be useful for historical purposes, it does not contain current information.

Szeredi, Pe?ter. The Semantic Web explained: the technology and mathematics behind Web 3.0, by Pe?ter Szeredi, Gergely Luka?csy, and Tama?s Benko? with Zsolt Nagy. Cambridge, 2014. 471p bibl index ISBN 9780521700368 pbk, $50.00; ISBN 9781139989190 ebook, $40.00.

“This is the English translation of a Hungarian work published in 2005.  Although many of the 100-plus references listed at the end of the book were accessed in 2013, it appears that the majority of the content has not been significantly updated since the original publication.  Szeredi (Budapest Univ. of Technology and Economics), Luka?csy (Cisco Systems, Ireland), and Benko? (Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland) discuss XHTML in the beginning chapter, but they do not mention HTML5 or its semantic capabilities.  Further, there is no discussion of accessibility and how this relates to the semantic web.  A quick web search of many technologies discussed in depth in the book show that the web pages cited were last updated between 2008 and 2011.  For example, the authors extensively discuss RDF but not RDFa (a method of including RDF in HTML pages), microformats (an alternative that arose after 2005 and has been supplanted by other technologies), or microdata (the latter is an alternative to RDF).  All these have been supplanted by newer technologies.  The book’s supporting website does not list errata, and the link to the external Haskell interpreter points to a server no longer in service.”

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