Covering basic introductions and intuitions, technical details, and formal foundations, this text presents the developments in Semantic Web standards, including RDF, RDF Schema, OWL 2, RIF, and SPARQL. It also explores formal semantics, OWL querying, the relationship between rules and OWL, and ontology engineering and applications.

A 2010 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title… The nine chapters of the book guide the reader through the major foundational languages for the semantic Web and highlight the formal semantics. … the book has very interesting supporting material and exercises, is oriented to W3C standards, and provides the necessary foundations for the semantic Web. It will be easy to follow by the computer scientist who already has a basic background on semantic Web issues; it will also be helpful for both self-study and teaching purposes. I recommend this book primarily as a complementary textbook for a graduate or undergraduate course in a computer science or a Web science academic program.—Computing Reviews, February 2010This book is unique in several respects. It contains an in-depth treatment of all the major foundational languages for the Semantic Web and provides a full treatment of the underlying formal semantics, which is central to the Semantic Web effort. It is also the very first textbook that addresses the forthcoming W3C recommended standards OWL 2 and RIF. Furthermore, the covered topics and underlying concepts are easily accessible for the reader due to a clear separation of syntax and semantics … I am confident this book will be well received and play an important role in training a larger number of students who will seek to become proficient in this growing discipline.—From the Foreword, Amit Sheth, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, USA