Foundations of the Semantic Web

It has been half a year now that our German textbook on Foundations of the Semantic Web has appeared [1]. We received very positive feedback and see our book adopted for Semantic Web courses throughout the German speaking countries. We are particularly pleased that our concept seems to have worked out, i.e. our decision to focus on established standards which form the foundation of the Semantic Web instead of giving a shallow overview of the many Semantic Web topics which are not yet mature enough for applications.

In particular, our book introduces RDF, RDF Schema, and OWL in very detail, and does so in an intuitive manner. Separate from this are chapters explaining the formal semantics in terms of logical foundations for these languages in depth, including deduction algorithms. This is accompanied by a discussion of SPARQL and conjunctive queries.

The book is accompanied by a website which contains slides which are ready-to-use for lectures, as well as exercises and selected solutions.

We have received many requests for providing a similar book in the English language, and indeed we are already working on it. This will also include a discussion of the forthcoming revision of the OWL standard, OWL 2, formerly known as OWL 1.1.

Any feedback is very welcome.

[1] Pascal Hitzler, Markus Krötzsch, Sebastian Rudolph, York Sure: Semantic Web. Grundlagen. Springer 2008, ISBN: 978-3-540-33993-9