
Introduction
The goal of this book is to introduce the foun dations of Semantic Web
technologies to a level of detail and depth which is not found in any other
textbook currently available. It is a book written for university course s as
well as for self-teaching, and suitable for researchers and practitioners alike.
It is based on five years of experience of the authors in teaching this subject.
In these five years a lot of things have happened. Semantic Web went from
a hyped research subject to one almost pronounced dead to one being invested
in by major IT companies. It turns out that it is not only alive and kicking –
it is actually growing rapidly ...