Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies

Thoroughly covering basic introductions and intuitions, technical details, and formal foundations, this text focuses on the established foundations in this area that have become relatively stable over time. It presents the latest developments in Semantic Web standards, including RDF, RDF Schema, OWL 2, RIF, and SPARQL. It also explores formal semantics, OWL querying, the relationship between rules and OWL, and ontology engineering and applications. The authors include many exercises with solutions in the back of the book and offer updates, errata, slides for teaching, and links to further resources at http: //semantic-web-book.org/

With more substantial funding from research organizations and industry, numerous large-scale applications, and recently developed technologies, the Semantic Web is quickly emerging as a well-recognized and important area of computer science. While Semantic Web technologies are still rapidly evolving, Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies focuses on the established foundations in this area that have become relatively stable over time. It thoroughly covers basic introductions and intuitions, technical details, and formal foundations. The book concentrates on Semantic Web technologies standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium: RDF and SPARQL enable data exchange and querying, RDFS and OWL provide expressive ontology modeling, and RIF supports rule-based modeling. The text also describes methods for specifying, querying, and reasoning with ontological information. In addition, it explores topics that are clearly beyond foundations, such as tools, applications, and engineering aspects. Written by highly respected researchers with a deep understanding of the material, this text centers on the formal specifications of the subject and supplies many pointers that are useful for employing Semantic Web technologies in practice. The book has an accompanying website with supplemental information.

The Quest for Semantics Building Models Calculating with Knowledge Exchanging Information Semanic Web Technologies RESOURCE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE (RDF) Simple Ontologies in RDF and RDF Schema Introduction to RDF Syntax for RDF Advanced Features Simple Ontologies in RDF Schema Encoding of Special Data Structures An Example RDF Formal Semantics Why Semantics? Model-Theoretic Semantics for RDF(S) Syntactic Reasoning with Deduction Rules The Semantic Limits of RDF(S) WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE (OWL) Ontologies in OWL OWL Syntax and Intuitive Semantics OWL Species The Forthcoming OWL 2 Standard OWL Formal Semantics Description Logics Model-Theoretic Semantics of OWL Automated Reasoning with OWL RULES AND QUERIES Ontologies and Rules What Is a Rule? Datalog as a First-Order Rule Language Combining Rules with OWL DL Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Query Languages SPARQL: Query Language for RDF Conjunctive Queries for OWL DL BEYOND FOUNDATIONS Ontology Engineering Requirement Analysis Ontology Creation: Where Is Your Knowledge? Quality Assurance of Ontologies Modular Ontologies: Divide and Conquer Software Tools Applications Web Data Exchange and Syndication Semantic Wikis Semantic Portals Semantic Metadata in Data Formats Semantic Web in Life Sciences Ontologies for Standardizations RIF Applications Toward Future Applications APPENDICES Extensible Markup Language (XML) XML in a Nutshell Syntax of XML XML Schema Set Theory Basic Notions Set Operations Relations and Functions Logic Syntax Semantics Proof Theory and Decidability Solutions to the Exercises References Index A Summary, Exercises, and Further Reading appear at the end of most chapters.

Pascal Hitzler works in the Kno.e.sis Center at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, USA. Markus Krötzsch and Sebastian Rudolph work in the institute AIFB at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany.