Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, and Liam Magee. Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research. Oxford, U.K.: Chandos Publishing, 2011. 525p. paperback, $110.00. (ISBN: 9781843346012). $110.00

I learned a lot from this book, which is a collection of chapters by a small group of authors loosely based around the notions of the Semantic Web and ontologies and their importance for scholarly and scientific communication and research. I'm not entirely sure, however, what to make of it. On the one hand, it reads like something that might be useful in a graduate library science seminar on the Semantic Web. And yet, it does not cite the relevant library literature, ignoring even the researchers at the University of Illinois, home institution of two of the authors. The notions of semantics and ontologies go way back in the library world, after all. There is a huge literature surrounding indexing languages and thesauri construction. It would have been nice had the authors at least given a respectful nod to this venerable and important body of literature. The book begins with several chapters foundational to the thrust of the book as a whole. Here we find chapters such as " Changing knowledge systems in the era of the social Web " ; " Frameworks for knowledge representation " ; " What does the digital do to knowledge making? " ; and " Textual representations and knowledge support-systems in research intensive networks. " It builds to a climax in what I think is the central and most important chapter, " Creating an interlanguage of the social Web. " What is an interlanguage, you ask? " Interlanguage " is a neologism referring, in essence, to a semantically rich, many-to-many crosswalk between schemas or ontologies (if I may briefly and boldly conflate the two for the purposes of this paragraph). An interlanguage can be thought of as a sort of fuse box connecting circuits out to/among/between schemas. In this central chapter, the authors discuss their framework for capturing such linguistic and structural concepts as synonymy, contiguity, hyponymy, hypernymy, co-hypernymy, antonymy, meronymy, co-meronymy, consistency, and collectivity across multiple given schemas; then, how an interlanguage between them can be constructed relative to the degrees of similarity across these concepts. Interestingly, this construction is not a one-time activity that freezes and fixes relations between schemas; rather, it is a process of continual inference and refinement that results in an organic inter-language. The authors illustrate this, using their CGML (Common Ground Markup Language) as an example. The chapter following this, " Interoperability and the exchange of humanly usable …