what's inside

Threads Explored:

• Scenarios of use
• Semantic Web layering
• A society of agents
• Trust and belief
• The life of annotations
• Collective knowledge
• The challenge of information:
  • incomplete
  • erroneous
  • conflicting

about the reader

The book's basic, conceptual approach is accessible to readers with a wide range of backgrounds and interests. Important points are illustrated with diagrams and occasional markup fragments. As it explores the landscape it encounters an ever-surprising variety of novel ideas and unexpected links. The book is easy and fun to read - you may find it hard to put down.

The Semantic Web is coming. This is a guide to the basic concepts and technologies that will come with it.

about the author

Thomas Passin is Principal Systems Engineer with Mitretek Systems, a non-profit systems and information engineering company. He has been involved in data modeling and created several complex database-backed web sites and also became engaged in a range of conceptual modeling approaches and graphical modeling technologies. He was a key member of a team that developed several demonstration XML-based web service applications, and worked on creating XML versions of draft standards originally written in ASN.1.

He graduated with a B.S. in physics from the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, then studied graduate-level physics at the University of Chicago. He became involved with XML-related work in 1998, with Topic Maps in 1999 and developed the open-source TM4JScript Javascript topic map engine.

Mr. Passin is the coauthor of the book Signal Processing in C. He lives in Reston, Virginia.

Read the JavaRanch interview with Thomas Passin.