I have received and swallowed Manning's first edition of "Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web" by Thomas B. Passin. I really enjoyed the reading

My 9-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):

Human beings have been working with the current incarnation of the world wide web for over twenty years now. Over time, the web has evolved from a network of strongly static pages into some highly dynamic and distributed information system. However, most of the information available on the web is targeted exclusively at humans. Computers still have a hard time "understanding" the meaning of information without proper human intervention. This is the gap the Semantic Web initiative is trying to bridge under the leadership of the W3C.

This book provides an excellent exploratory and speculative essay on what the Semantic Web could/will be given the current state of the different technologies that together will help build tomorrow’s web. It also features brief, yet attractive and very well written, primers on RDF and topic maps as well as some advanced explorations on web page annotations, ontologies, logic, web services, distributed trusting and software agents.

It is worth noting that this book does not contain any single line of code, merely some RDF excerpts. It is thus specifically targeted at people willing to share the author’s futuristic visions on the Semantic Web than hardcore programmers in bad need of a code indigestion. For the latter, the author provides some helpful piece of advice on how to contribute to the Semantic Web movement as well as an extensive list of references to follow if they want to drill down some topics in more depths. Definitely a great reading!!