American Library Association Commends Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies Textbook

Posted: 4th January 2011

Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies, a textbook co-written by Oxford's Markus Krötzsch has been recognised in the American Library Association's prestigious list of ‘Outstanding Academic Titles’.

Published annually in the Association’s Choice journal, the list reflects the very best in scholarly titles reviewed within Choice during the past year, and brings with it extraordinary recognition amongst the international academic library community.

The publication reviews some 7,000 high-quality works every year across a broad spectrum of disciplines. Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies is one of just seven Information and Computer Science books highlighted in this year's ‘Outstanding Academic Titles’.

Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies has been recognised for its success in a number of key areas, including: overall excellence in presentation and scholarship, importance relative to other literature in the field, the originality of its treatment of the subject, and its value to undergraduate students.

The Semantic Web is quickly emerging as a well-recognized and important area of Computer Science. While Semantic Web technologies are still rapidly evolving, this book focuses on the established foundations in this area that have become relatively stable over time. Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies 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 modelling, and RIF supports rule-based modelling. The book 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

Markus Krötzsch, a post-doctoral researcher at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, co-authored the book with Pascal Hitzler of the Kno.e.sis Center at Wright State University in Dayton, USA and Sebastian Rudolph from the institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, where Markus Krötzsch was previously based.

The American Library Association is a non-profit organization that promotes libraries and library education, internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with its book recommendations taken very seriously its 62,000 plus members.

Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies, by Pascal Hitzler, Markus Krötzsch, and Sebastian Rudolph. CRC Press/Chapman and Hall, 2010. ISBN 9781420090505