I read the new Manning book Explorer’s guide to the Semantic Web over the weekend.
This is a pretty bold book for Manning, since the Semantic Web is really in its infancy. The book is much more heavy on theory (with some serious XML here and there), which isn’t the fault of the writer… there just isn’t much out there!
I really hope we get to the Semantic Web at some point, and do think it will happen.
One of the problems is the complexity that exists. When you have humans reading content, you can take for granted that they can work things out. You don’t need the categorization, the antologies, and everything else that comes into life when you talk about computers consuming content.
The web took off, partly due to the simplicity that it brought. Many people could work out simple HTML. Even though it is painful how forgiving browsers are (matching tags etc etc) it DID allow people to hack around to get by.
The Semantic Web isn’t a simple, and can’t be (at least yet). I am excited at the possibilities though, and this book lists some nice use cases.
Kudos to Manning for publishing this forward thinking book, and thanks to Thomas Passin for spending the time on it.
