Bob DuCharme

This book's biggest advantage is its very narrow focus: To teach the reader how SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) can be utilized for Semantic Web triple stores and linked data sets. That is, instead of diving into origins, whys and hows of Semantic Web, it spends about 220 information-rich pages full of tips and tricks you can immediately apply to your daily semantic web development and especially query design and interpretation problems. If you are a complete Semantic Web novice, then this book should not be your first book because there are other excellent books that very gently introduce semantic concepts as well as ontology design topics; but as a second or third book, especially for people dealing with SPARQL and ones who want to see what the new SPARQL 1.1 is up to (which you can already use), this is the best book currently published.

On the other hand, you should be prepared for the lack of Semantic Web application development examples: The book includes a few short code snippets in Python and a very simplistic semantic web application (again in Python) but other than that all of the pages are dedicated to pure SPARQL; do not look for any detailed chapter on using Jena API in Java or in depth discussion of semantic web application design in Python, Ruby, etc., together with ontology and knowledge management guidelines.

In summary, if you have to choose between the official SPARQL 1.1 standard at http://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-query/ and this book, I have very little doubt about your first choice.… (more)