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Reviewer: Annika M. Hinze

A structured approach to understanding and programming semantic Web services, processes, and applications is provided in this book. This is an edited collection of work with contributions from 30 authors in industry and academia. The book is structured into three parts, each covering the topics of semantic Web services, processes, and real-world applications. Each part consists of several chapters that address aspects of these topics with varying degrees of technical detail. The introduction guides readers from different backgrounds, recommending different reading orders depending on experience and goals. The three chapters designed for beginners help the reader to start to gain an understanding of the more advanced content presented in the other chapters. Beginners are (rightfully) assumed to have had some exposure to the existing World Wide Web. Beginners will find an introduction to semantic Web concepts, a semantic Web case study for tourism, and an introduction to the development of semantic Web applications using the Jena toolkit. These chapters allow beginners to understand and develop their own applications and to gain hands-on experience in semantic Web programming. The main contribution of the book lies in the seven chapters for intermediate readers. These chapters cover the building blocks for understanding and developing complex applications for the semantic Web: modeling and discovering Web service, service design, interaction, and composition. All major technical concepts of the semantic Web (such as Web ontology language, Web service modeling ontology, Web services description language, and universal description, discovery, and integration) are introduced and explored with practical examples and exercises. The chapters also discuss the ongoing standardization efforts in the context of semantic Web services. Two case studies complement these chapters by discussing the issues practitioners face when developing complex semantic services for e-government and business processes. The chapters designed for beginners and intermediate readers give a solid foundation for an advanced information systems course on semantic Web services. The course material provided on the book’s Web page has been used by this volume’s editors at the University of Georgia and the University of Madeira, Portugal. The book is suited for self-study on the theoretical and practical level, and can also serve as an introductory guide for practitioners. The book offers four advanced chapters on theoretical issues of the semantic Web, formal reasoning about service behavior, service composition using multi-objective optimization. An advanced case study of semantics in the field of bioinformatics is also provided. These chapters are best approached with not only a solid background and experience in semantic Web application development, but also an understanding of advanced computer science theory. Each chapter is largely self-contained. The different technical aspects could have been made easier to understand by developing and revisiting examples in the course of the book. The chapters are only loosely cross-referenced and some readers may prefer a stronger alignment between the chapter references and topics. Unfortunately, the chapter numbering used in the introduction is not carried on in the table of contents, and is only partly used throughout the book. Each chapter closes with a section of review and discussion questions for beginner, intermediate, and advanced readers, and practical exercises are also provided. Disappointingly, the programming examples are not easily available online or in an electronic version (some may be extracted from the slides that are provided online). At the time of writing, answers and solutions for the questions and exercises were not available, which makes the book less useful for self-study. In addition to the references used within each chapter, recommendations for additional reading provide good starting points for further studies. There are some inconsistencies in the formatting and presentation of the book that may distract some readers from the content. Moreover, the reproduction quality of the tables and figures is not always of a high standard. Thanks to its explicit structure, the book is equally suitable for research scientists, courses at the graduate level, and practitioners. The cover shows a background comprising a chemical structure, a map overlaid with a star field, and columns of zeros and ones behind a stylized three-dimensional computer-generated torso of an impersonal vacant-looking hero with bulging muscles. This imagery seems slightly cold and at odds with the series title: “Semantic Web and Beyond: Computing for Human Experience.” Online Computing Reviews Service

Reviewer: Alessandro Berni

Editors Cardoso and Sheth present a collection of papers on the usage of semantic Web technologies within service-oriented architectures, to provide seamless interoperability between loosely coupled heterogeneous systems. I believe semantic Web technologies will assume a central role in the extraction of knowledge from digital data. This book will enable readers to get a better understanding of the practical aspects of the subject. The book covers a range of topics, from semantic annotation to the design of semantic Web processes, passing through service modeling ontologies and real-life examples of federated information systems. Because they present various levels of complexity, chapters can be considered individually, to serve audience members with different degrees of expertise. Beginners will find background information, such as an introduction to the Web ontology language (OWL) and to Jena, an open-source semantic Web framework for Java, and a toolkit for developing semantic Web applications based on resource description framework (RDF) and OWL. Undergraduate and graduate students at an intermediate level will learn how existing standards for Web services can be augmented by semantic information and conceptual models for ontological specification based on maximum decoupling and scalable mediation of services. Advanced users, at the graduate or professional level, will find coverage of theoretical aspects, such as a formalism for reasoning about service behaviors over periods of time; discussions on the composition of Web services based on multi-objective optimization techniques; and semantic applications to share and integrate data and bioinformatics tools in life sciences, to enable biologists to process and analyze data at equal pace with high-throughput experimental data generation. This book will be useful to anyone interested in applying semantic Web services and processes to develop real-world applications. It can be used as a textbook at the graduate level or as a reference book, with the possibility of expanding the topics discussed through the list of suggested reading provided at the end of each chapter. Each chapter also contains questions for discussion, at increasing levels of difficulty, as well as practical exercises. Another aspect worth mentioning is the fact that several of the 30 authors of the book are actively involved with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), ensuring that readers are provided with first-hand information on emerging semantic Web standards. Online Computing Reviews Service