The Semantic Web: A Guide to the Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management eBook

The book throws around all of the right buzzwords: ontologies, XML, KIF, taxonomies, metadata, etc. However, it never even properly defines these terms or organizes the information. If you already understand what the semantic web is, the book makes perfect sense but you don't learn anything new. If you don't already understand what the semantic web is, you won't be able to make sense of the author's high level descriptions and diagrams and you won't learn anything either. You can go to Wikipedia and probably get better explanations of most of the terminology. For example the Wikipedia definition of ontology from a computer science perspective is : "In computer science, an ontology is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them." Why can't the author just SAY that??? Instead he wanders all over the map with a kind of philosophical musing about ontologies, and then proceeds to dissect a human resources ontology without ever properly defining why this model is useful in terms of the semantic web and what makes this model an ontology in the first place. The whole book is like this.
The only reason I give it three stars is that there is useful albeit poorly organized information in here, and if you do know what the semantic web is and you have to present the information to management you can use the individual pieces of the book to probably stitch together a pretty good introductory presentation ... providing you already know what you are doing.
However, I really recommend the book "The Semantic Web Primer" instead. It is more technical and better organized with much clearer explanations.