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This page intent on aly left blankPreface to the second editionSince the first edition of Se manic Web for the Work ng Ontolog is team cout in June 2008.wc have beenencouraged by the recept on the book has rec civ ed.Practitioners from a wide variety of industries-health e are.energy.environmental science, lifesciences, national intelligence, and publishing, to namea few—have told us that the first edition clari lied for them the possibilities and capabilities of Semanticweb technology.This was the audience we had hoped to reach, and we are happy to see that we haveSince that time, the technology standards of the SemanticWeb have continued to develop.SPARQL,the query language for RDF, became a Recommendation from the WorldWide Web Conso rium and wasso successful that version 2is already nearly ready(it will probably be ratified by the time this book seesprint) .SKOS, which we de seri bed as an example of modeling“in the wild in the first edition, has racedto the forefront of the SemanticWeb with high-profile uses in a wide variety of industries, so we gave ita chapter of its own.Version 2 of the Web Ontology Language, OWL, also appeared during this time.Probably the biggest development in the SemanticWeb standards since the first edition is the rise ofthe query language SPARQL.Beyond being a query language.SPARQL is a powerful graph-matchinglanguage which pushes its utility beyond simple queries.In particular, SPARQL can be used to spee if ygeneral inferencing in a con cisc and precise way.We have adopted it as the main expository languagefor describing inferencing in this book.Itt umns out to be alot casier to describe RDF.RDFS.and OWLin terms of SPARQL.
The“in the wild sections became problem aic in the second edition, but for a good reason—we hadtoo many good examples to choose from.Were very happy with the tinal choices, and are ple used with theresulting“in the wild chapters( 9 and 13) .The Open Graph Protocol and Good Relations are probablyresponsible for more serious RDF data on the Web than any other efforts.While one may argue(and manyhave) that FOAF is gct tinga bit long in the tooth, recent developments in social nel working have broughtcon cems about privacy and ownership of social data to the for e; it was exactly these concerns thatmotiva led FOAF over a de eade ago.We also include two scientific examples of models“in the wild -Q UDT(Quantities, Units, Dimensions, and Types) and The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies(OBO) .QU DTi sag real example of how SPARQL.can be used to specify detailed computation overa large set of rules(rules for converting units and for performing dimensional analysis) .The wealth ofinformaton in the OBO has made them perennial favorites in heathcare and the life seien ees.In ourpresentation.we hope to make the mace es sible to an audience who doesn't have specialized experiencewith OBO publication conventions.While these chapters logically build on the material that precedesthem, we have done our best to make them standalone, so that impatient readers who haven't yet masteredall the fine points of the earlier chapters can sill appreciate the'wild examples.We have added some organizational aids to the book since the first edition.The“Challenges”thatappear throughout the book, as in the first edition.provide examples for howto use the SemanticWebtechnologies to solve common modeling problems.The“FAQ section organizes the challenges bytopic, or, more properly, by the task that they illustrate.We have added a numeric index of all thechallenges to help the reader cross-reference themWe hope that the second edition will strike a chord with our readers as the first edition has done,On asad note, many of the examples in ChapterS use“Elizabeth Taylor as an example of a livingactress. During postproduction of this book, Dame Elizabeth Taylor sue cum bed to congestive heartfailure and died We were too far along in the production to make the change, so we have kept theexamples as they are.May her soul rest in peace,
In 2003, when the WorldWide Web Consortium was working toward the ratification of theRe commendations for the SemanticWeb languages, R DE, RDFS, and OWL, we realized that there was a needfor an industrial-level introductory course in these technologies.The standards were l echnical ly sound,but, as is typically the case with standards documents, they were written with technical completenessin mid rather than education.Were a ized that for this technology to takeoff, people other thanmathematicians and logicians would have to learn the basie s of semantic modeling.Toward that end, we started a collaboration to create a series of trainings aimed not at universitystudents or technologists but at Web developers who were practitioners in some other field.In short.weneeded to get the SemanticWeb out of the hands of thc logicians and Web technologists.whose job hadbeen to build a consistent and robust infrastructure, and into the hands of the practi tion crs who were tobuild the SemanticWeb.The Web didn't grow to the size it is today through the efforts of only HTMLdesigners, nor would the SemanticWeb grow as a result of only logicians'efforts.After a year or so of offering training to a variety of audiences, we delivered a training course at theNational Agriculture Library of the U.S.Department of Agriculture.Present for this training werea wide variety of practitioners in many fields, including healthcare, finance, engin ce ring, nationalintellige nee, and enterprise architecture.The unique synergy of these varied practitioners resulted ina dynamic four-day investigation into the power and subtlety of semantic modeling.Although thepractitioners in the room were innovative and intelligent, we found that even for these early adopters,some of the new ways of thinking required for modeling in a WorldWide Wehcontexiweretoosuhtleto master after just a one-week course.One participant had registered for the course multiple times,in siting that something else“e licked each time she went through the exercisesThis is when we realized that although the course was doing a good job of disseminating theinformation and skills for the SemanticWeb, another, more are hiv al resource was needed.We had tocreate something that students could work with on their own and could consult when they hadquestions.This was the point at which the idea of a book on modeling in the SemanticWeb wasconceived.We realized that the readership needed to include a wide variety of people from a number offic lds, not just programmers or Web application developers but all the people from different fic lds whowere struggling to understand howto use the new Web languagesIt was tempting at first to design this book to be the definitive statement on the SemanticWebvision.or“everything you ever wanted to know about OWL, including comparisons to programmodeling languages such as UML, knowledge modeling languages, the or ics of inferencing and logic,details of the Web infrastructure(URIs and URLs) , and the exact current status of all the developingstandards(including SPARQL, G RDDL, RDF a, and the new OWL 1.l effort) .We realized, however,that not only would such a book be a superhuman undertaking, but it would also fail to serve ourprimary purpose of putting the tools of the SemanticWeb into the hands of a generation of intelligentpractitioners who could build real applications, For this reason, we concentra led on a particularessential skill for construe ting the SemanticWeb:building useful and reusable models in the WorldWide Web sellingMany of the sep attems entail several variants, each embodying a different philosophy or approachto modeling.For adva need eases such as these, we realized that wee ould n't hope to provide a single,definitive answer to how these things should be modeled.So instead, our goal is to educate domainpractitioners so that they can read and understand design patterns of this sort and have the intel lee tualtools to make considered decisions about which ones to use and howto adapt them.We wanted to focuson those trying to use RDF.RDFS.and OWL to accomplish specific tasks and model their own dataand domains, rather than write a generic book on ontology development.Thus.we have focused on the“working ontolog ist who was trying to create a domain model on the SemanticWeb.a single statement but one that is especially helpful when used in a particular context.The value of the
Preface to the first editionThe design patterns we use in this book tend to be much simpler.Often a pat tem consists of onlypattern is n'tso much in the complexity of its realization but in the awareness of the sort of situation inwhich it can be used,This“make it useful philosophy also motiva led the choice of the examples we use lo illustratethese pat lern sin this book.There area number of competing criteria for good example domains ina book of this sort.The examples must he understandable to a wide variety of audiences, fairlycamp elling, yet complex en oui gh to re fleet real modeling situations.The actual examples we haveencountered in our customer modeling situations satisfy the last condition but either are toospecialized—for example.modeling complex molecular biologie al data.or, in some cases, they are toobusiness-sensitive—for example, modeling particular investment policies-to publish for a generalaudience.
We also had to struggle with a tension between the coherence of the examples.We had to decidebetween using the samc example throughout the book versus having stylistic variation and differentexamples, both so the prose didn't get too heavy with one topic, but also so the book didn't become oneabout howto model—for example, the life and works of William Shakes pc are for the SemanticWeb.We addressed these competing constraints by introducing u fairly small number of exampledomains:William Shakespeare is used to illustrate some of the most basic cap abi ties of theSemanticWeb.The tabular information ah out products and the manufacturing locations was inspiredby the sample data provided with a popular database management package.Other examples comefrom domains we've worked within the pastor where there had been particular interest among ourstudents.We hope the examples based on the roles of people in a workplace will be familiar to justabout anyone who has worked in an of ice with more than one person, and that they highlight thecapabilities of Se manic Web modeling when it comes to the different ways entities can be related toone another.
Some of the more involved examples are based on ae tual modeling challenges from fairly involvedcustomer applications.For example, the icecream example in Chapter 7is based, believe it or not ona workflow analysis example from a NASA application.The questionnaire is based on a number ofcustomer examples for controlled data gathering, including sensitive intelligence gathering fora military application.In these cases.the domain has been changed to make the examples moreentertaining and accessible to a general audience.We have included a number of extended examples of SemanticWeb modeling in the wild, wherewe have found publicly available and accessible modeling projects for which the rc is no need to sanitizethe models.These examples can include any number of anomalies or idiosyncrasies, which would beconfusing as an introduction to modeling but as illustrations give a better picture about how thesesystems are being used on the WorldWide Web, In accordance with the tenet that this book does notinclude everything we know about the SemanticWeb, these examples are limited to the modeling issuesthat arise around the problem of distributing s true tured knowledge over the Web.Thus, the treatmentfocuses on how informaion is modeled for reuse and robustness in a distributed environment