I decided to give an overview of the best books that you can buy to make yourself well-rounded in terms of Linked Data, the Semantic Web and the Web of Data.

Knowledge Working

Let us first start off with what I like to call “Knowledge Working”, this is essentially the realm of technical knowledge-management and knowledge acquisition/modelling. There are three books that I would promote in this respect.

The first is Information Systems Development: Methodologies, Techniques and Tools written by Avison & Fitzgerald. This book, although it gets down and dirty with some technical detail, can be incredibly useful for an overview to information systems and knowledge design in general.

The second is Knowledge Engineering and Management: The CommonKADS Methodology (A Bradford book) by Guus Schreiber et al (aka the CommonKADS team). I was taught from this book on one of my modules during my undergraduate degree, it is less “programmer-based” than the Avison & Fitzgerald book, but has very useful information about acquisition, modelling and analysis of knowledge. I highly recommend this, particularly as it is incredibly useful when coupled with Semantic Web technology.

The third book is a new book that we’re waiting to have the second edition of (at the time of writing it was estimated to be available 13th July 2011). This book is Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL by Allemang & Hendler (first edition here). Allemang and Hendler are heavyweights in the Semantic Web world, with Allemang being chief scientist at TopQuadrant and Hendler being one of the writers of the earliest and most well known articles on “The Semantic Web” (New Scientist: 2001 with Berners-Lee and Lassila). This book is quite technical in places, but it does focus on ontologies and metadata (and metametadata?).

Web Science

Web Science is another important area of interest, particularly in the earlier stages of Linked Data and Semantic Web development and actually applying the theory into practice.

The earliest official book by the Web Science Trust team was A Framework for Web Science (Foundations and Trends in Web Science) by Berners-Lee et al. This is quite an expensive book, and quite academic in style, but useful nonetheless.

You may want to look at something a little cheaper, something a little more practical too. This is where The Web’s Awake: An Introduction to the Field of Web Science and the Concept of Web Life by Tetlow comes in. This interesting book takes a common sense approach to Web Science, I would certainly recommend it.

Tools and Techniques: The Evolution from the Semantic Web to Linked Data

There are the classics such as Practical RDF by Powers and A Semantic Web Primer by Antoniou and van Harmelen. There are introductory books such as Semantic Web For Dummies by Pollock. These are all good foundational books which are recommended, but they often don’t get to the essence of the Semantic Web and especially not Linked Data.

For the essential Semantic Web and Linked Data we may want to look at: Programming the Semantic Web by Segaran (who also authored the wonderful Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications) et al. Semantic Web Programming
by Hebeler (of BBN Technologies) et al. Plus there are the quite useful, although very specific, books Linking Enterprise Data and Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space (Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web, Theory and Technology) (which is also available free at “Linked Data by Heath and Bizer” ( https://linkeddatabook.com/ ) ).

Other topics of interest

There are of course other areas of interest which are very relevant to true Linked Data and Semantic Web, these include:

  • Semantic Networks and Frames - from the fields of logic and artificial intelligence. This also inspired Object-Oriented theory.
  • Pointers and References - yep the ones from programming (such as in C++).
  • HyperText Transfer Protocol
  • Graph Theory

I hope this list of interesting and useful books is handy, please do comment if you have any other books that you wish to share with us.

Thank you,

Daniel