New book on the semantic web published

John Davies, head of Semantic Technology in the Centre for Information Systems and Security Research in BT Innovate, has recently published a book co-authored by representatives of a leading European research institute.

The book, entitled Semantic Knowledge Management and published by Springer, describes work from the €12m EU collaborative project, of which John was the project director.

Despite its explosive growth over the last decade, the web remains essentially a tool to allow humans to access information. Semantic web technologies like RDF (resource description framework), OWL (ontology web language) and other W3C (world wide web consortium) standards aim to extend the web’s capability through increased availability of machine-processable information. John and colleagues Marko Grobelnik and Dunja Mladenic from the Slovenian Josef Stefan Research Institute, have grouped contributions from renowned researchers into four parts: technology; integration aspects of knowledge management; knowledge discovery and human language technologies; and case studies. Together, they offer a concise vision of semantic knowledge management, ranging from knowledge acquisition to ontology management to knowledge integration, and their applications in domains such as telecommunications, social networks and legal information processing.

The book is a combination of fundamental research, tools and applications in semantic web technologies. It serves the fundamental interests of researchers and developers in this field in both academia and industry who need to track web technology developments and to understand their business implications.

Technology described in the book and developed on the SEKT project has now been deployed by BT in a novel fault prediction and analysis system. The system uses knowledge discovery technology to predict faults in large ICT networks before they occur and also to identify the root cause of a set of faults. It is being trialled at BT's Sheffield Network Command Centre. Prediction of faults and root cause analysis can save time spent finding and fixing faults, reduce the number of faults and improve customer satisfaction.

John’s book is available here.