A Semantic Web Primer

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 still 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 and includes exercises, project descriptions, and annotated references to relevant
online materials. A Semantic Web Primer provides 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 as well as such crucial related topics as ontology
engineering and application scenarios. This substantially revised and updated second edition
reflects 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 query language; OWL DLP and its
interesting practical and theoretical properties; the SWRL language (in the chapter on rules); OWL-S
(on which the discussion of Web services is now based). The new final chapter considers the state of
the art of the field today, captures ongoing discussions, and outlines the most challenging issues
facing the Semantic Web in the future. Supplementary materials, including slides, online versions 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 at the Institute for Computer
Science, FORTH (Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas), Heraklion, Greece. Frank van
Harmelen is Professor in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the Vrije Universiteit,
Amsterdam, the Netherlands.