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liyang yu, Ph.D.

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  • All About Me:
  • My Books:
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    "Perhaps the only one with a very concrete, introductory practical approach of showing the reader how to do things in the Semantic Web" - commented by one of the reviewers

    A Developer's Guide to the Semantic Web

    From the reviews: "As the title suggests, this book is about the semantic Web, the standards and technologies that allow computers to understand the meaning of information posted online. ...this book covers numerous aspects of the semantic Web in significant detail ... . primarily intended for software developers, researchers, and practicing professionals who want to gain expertise in the fundamentals quickly. It may also be useful for students taking courses on the semantic Web. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals/practitioners." (M. B. DuBois, CHOICE, Vol. 48 (11), August, 2011)

    • title: A Developer's Guide to the Semantic Web
    • published by Springer;
    • this book offers a complete coverage of all core standards and technical components of the Semantic Web, such as RDF, RDFS, OWL 1 and 2, SPARQL (including features offered by SPARQL 1.1);
    • this book also provides in-depth coverage of both the what-is and how-to aspects of the Semantic Web; once finishing the book, the reader will obtain not only a solid understanding about the Semantic Web, but also learn how to combine all the pieces to build new applications on the Semantic Web;
    • you can buy this book from Springer or, Amazon.

  • Get the code:

  • About the Semantic Web:

    • The Semantic Web represents a vision for how to make the huge amount of information on the Web automatically processable by machines on a large scale.
    • It all started from here, The Semantic Web (Scientific American, May 2001), where the vision of the Semantic Web is formally described by Tim Berners-Lee. The following are the key components involved:
      • RDF is the fundamental building block of the Semantic Web - RDF to the Semantic Web is as HTML to the Web;
      • RDFS offers a vocabulary and common language that RDF statements can use to express facts; further more,
      • OWL (1 & 2) as a Web Ontology language, provides much better expression power than RDFS, and in addition,
      • SPARQL is a query language for you to query the structured information expressed on the Web - using the Semantic Web without SPARQL is like using the database without SQL.
    • Besides the above core components/standards, there are other technical pieces that also fit into the structure of the Semantic Web. For example, Turtle, Microformats, RDFa, GRDDL, SKOS, just to name a few.
    • Recently, Linked Data and Web of Data are two closely related concepts, and they can be understood as one implementation of the Semantic Web vision.
    • In order to understand all the above concepts/components/standards, you can read W3C's documents to get an overall understanding about the Semantic Web.
    • My books can help you overcome this steep learning curve - it makes learning and understanding of the Semantic Web much easier, many real life examples and coding examples are also included in the books.
    • There are tools available to help you code on Semantic Web. codeproject is my favorite - learn it, use it and love it!

      Finally, here are some useful links you might want to check out:

  • Miscellaneous Stuff:

    copyright© Liyang Yu, 2012