We are proud to announce the release of the Third Edition of Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist. It has been 8 years since the release of the second edition. There are a number of new features in this edition:
The most noticeable to you since you are reading this is the website. Now that the Semantic Web is a reality, we have hosted the data from the book on this website as a set of semantic web resources. In particular:
- Every data set in the book is indexed on this website, and available for download.
- Furthermore, the data sets are hosted at data.world, which provides services for data like the services that GitHub provides for code. This means that the queries are also hosted here. You can run the queries, and even edit them. You will need a login to data.world to do this, but that is easily done if you have an identity on any of several networks.
- Every resource in the data sets is available according to the follow-your-nose pattern. Since the sample URIs in the book are "hash uris" this means that a server can't provide just the information about a single resource; so you'll get infromation about a set of related resources.
New Material
The third edition includes some new material not found in the second edition. This includes:
- A new chapter on Linked Data protocols. The Semantic Web is fully integrated into the web infrastructure, and there are clear protocols for how to use it effectively. (Chapter 5)
- SHACL - the Shapes language for RDF. SHACL complements the modeling capabilities of OWL by providing closed-world defintions of expectations of RDF resources.
- Schema.org - one of the most successful Semantic Web applications. Earlier examples from Good Relations are now absorbed into Schema.org
- FIBO - the Financial Industry Business Ontology. One of the most advanced uses of OWL in industry today.
- BridgeDB - a powerful link set mapping concepts in life sciences across various data sources.
- wikidata, dbpedia, and other powerful linked data sources
Many familiar examples have been updated to reflect recent work. AGROVOC, QUDT, and data.gov have all progressed since the second edition; the new features are reflected in the examples. All of the examples from these sources are inclued in the queries on this web site; a snapshot of each of these data sets is included in the data on this site (and often, we simply link to the most recent publication of these things, like FIBO and dbpedia).
In our practice in academia and industry, we are more sophisticated about what works and what doesn't work in building a semantic web system. The advice chapters at the end of the book are a good deal more mature than they were in 2012.
And we saved the biggest thing for last - we welcome Fabien Gandon as a new author for Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist. He brings a strong instinct for Web Science and linked data to the project; we are thrilled to have his contribution.