Practical Ontologies for Information Professionals provides an accessible introduction and exploration of ontologies and demonstrates their value to information professionals.

More data and information is being created than ever before. Ontologies, formal representations of knowledge with rich semantic relationships, have become increasingly important in the context of today?s information overload and data deluge. The publishing and sharing of explicit explanations for a wide variety of conceptualizations, in a machine readable format, has the power to both improve information retrieval and discover new knowledge. Information professionals are key contributors to the development of new, and increasingly useful, ontologies.

Practical Ontologies for Information Professionals provides an accessible introduction to the following:

• defining the concept of ontologies and why they are increasingly important to information professionals
• ontologies and the semantic web
• existing ontologies, such as RDF, RDFS, SKOS, and OWL2
• adopting and building ontologies, showing how to avoid repetition of work and how to build a simple ontology
• interrogating ontologies for reuse
• the future of ontologies and the role of the information professional in their development and use.

This book will be useful reading for information professionals in libraries and other cultural heritage institutions who work with digitalization projects, cataloguing and classification and information retrieval. It will also be useful to LIS students who are new to the field.

? ... an impressive and comprehensive study. Of special note are the chapters on 'Ontologies and Information Professions'; 'Alternative Semantic Visions'; and 'Ontological Documentation'. Impressively well written, organized, and presented, "Practical Ontologies for Information Professionals" will prove to be an enduringly valued and appreciated addition to professional, community, and academic library Information Science reference collections and supplemental studies reading lists.?