Efficient access to data, sharing data, extracting information from data, and making use of the information have become urgent needs for today's corporations. With so much data on the Web, managing it with conventional tools is becoming almost impossible. New tools and techniques are necessary to provide interoperability as well as warehousing betw

"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." —Tim Berners-Lee, Scientific American, May 2001 This authoritative guide shows how the Semantic Web works technically and how businesses can utilize it to gain a competitive advantage Explains what taxonomies and ontologies are as well as their importance in constructing the Semantic Web Companion Web site includes further updates as the framework develops and links to related sites

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the Second International Workshop on Semantic Web and Databases, SWDB 2004, held in Toronto, Canada in August 2004 as a satellite workshop of VLDB 2004. The 14 revised full papers presented together with 2 papers by the invited keynote speakers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 47 submissions. Among the topics addressed are data semantics, semantic Web services, service-oriented computing, workflow composition, XML semantics, relational tables, ontologies, semantic Web algebra, heterogeneous data sources, context mediation, OWL, ontology engineering, data integration, semantic Web queries, database queries, and peer-to-peer warehouses.

The emerging Second-Generation Web is based entirely on XML and related technologies. It is intended to result in the creation of the Semantic Web, on which computers will be able to deal with the meaning ("semantics") of Web data and hence to process them in a more effective and autono mous way. This new version of the Web introduces a multitude of novel concepts, terms, and acronyms. Purpose, Scope and Methods This dictionary is an effort to specify the terminological basis of emerging XML and Semantic Web technologies. The ultimate goal of this dictionary is even broader than just to define the meaning of newwords - itaims to develop aproper understandingofthese leading-edge technologies. To achieve this, comprehensible definitions of technical terms are supported by numerous diagrams and code snippets, clearly annotated and explained. The main areas covered in this dictionary are: (1) XML syntax and core technologies, such as Namespaces, Infoset and XML Schema; (2) all the major membersofthe XML family oftechnologies, such as XSLT, XPath and XLink; (3) numerous XML-based domain-specific languages, such as NewsML (News Markup Language); (4) the concept and architecture of the Semantic Web; (5) key Semantic Web technologies,such as RDF (Resource Description Framework), RDF Schema and OWL (Web Ontology Language); and (6) Web services, including WSDL (Web Services Description Lan guage) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).

The Semantic Web, which is intended to establish a machine-understandable Web, is currently changing from being an emerging trend to a technology used in complex real-world applications. A number of standards and techniques have been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), e.g., the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which provides a general method for conceptual descriptions for Web resources, and SPARQL, an RDF querying language. Recent examples of large RDF data with billions of facts include the UniProt comprehensive catalog of protein sequence, function and annotation data, the RDF data extracted from Wikipedia, and Princeton University’s WordNet. Clearly, querying performance has become a key issue for Semantic Web applications. In his book, Groppe details various aspects of high-performance Semantic Web data management and query processing. His presentation fills the gap between Semantic Web and database books, which either fail to take into account the performance issues of large-scale data management or fail to exploit the special properties of Semantic Web data models and queries. After a general introduction to the relevant Semantic Web standards, he presents specialized indexing and sorting algorithms, adapted approaches for logical and physical query optimization, optimization possibilities when using the parallel database technologies of today’s multicore processors, and visual and embedded query languages. Groppe primarily targets researchers, students, and developers of large-scale Semantic Web applications. On the complementary book webpage readers will find additional material, such as an online demonstration of a query engine, and exercises, and their solutions, that challenge their comprehension of the topics presented.

Nowadays, more and more users are witnessing the impact of Hypermedia/Multimedia as well as the penetration of social applications in their life. Parallel to the evolution of the Internet and Web, several Hypermedia/Multimedia schemes and technologies bring semantic-based intelligent, personalized and adaptive services to the end users. More and more techniques are applied in media systems in order to be user/group-centric, adapting to different content and context features of a single or a community user. In respect to all the above, researchers need to explore and study the plethora of challenges that emergent personalisation and adaptation technologies bring to the new era. This edited volume aims to increase the awareness of researchers in this area. All contributions provide an in-depth investigation on research and deployment issues, regarding already introduced schemes and applications in Semantic Hyper/Multimedia and Social Media Adaptation. Moreover, the authors provide survey-based articles, so as potential readers can use it for catching up the recent trends and applications in respect to the relevant literature. Finally, the authors discuss and present their approach in the respective field or problem addressed.