Introduction to Semantic Web Development

Author: C. Sean Burns
Date: 2025-04-20
Email: sean.burns@uky.edu
Website: cseanburns.net
GitHub: @cseanburns

Introduction

This book serves as an introduction to semantic web development. A more advanced semantic web development course would introduce students to RDFS, SKOS, OWL, SPARQL or more. But this book expects undergraduate students who are new to web development. Therefore this work focuses on entry level topics: HTML5 and its semantic elements, CSS3, and JSON-LD with schema.org.

Example code and files for this work will be updated each semester I teach this course. Each semester will have its own repo. List of repos:

How to Use this Book

Markup

There are two markup styles that I want to bring to your attention:

Code Blocks

Text that looks like code blocks indicate some kind of command, series of commands, or web code. To learn the material, do not copy and paste the code into your terminal or text editor. You should practice and type all code yourself.

Asides

I occasionally insert asides into the text. These asides generally contain notes or extra comments about the main content. Asides look like this:

This is an aside. Asides will contain extra information, notes, or comments.

Website Version

Theme

If reading this on the website, at the top of the page is an icon of a paint brush. The default theme is darker text on a light background, but you can change the theme per your preferences.

Next to the paintbrush is an icon of a magnifying glass. Use this to search this work.

Printing

I intend this book to be a living document, which means it'll be regularly updated. But feel free to print it, if you want. You can use the print function to save the entire book as a PDF file. See the printer icon at the top right of the screen to get started.

EPUB Version

This work also is available as an EPUB. Download the EPUB file from the GitHub repo.

About This Book

This book works is living document since I use it for my spring semester Semantic Web Development course. I will update the content as I teach it in order to address changes in the technology and to edit for clarity.

This book is not a comprehensive introduction to semantic web development. It is designed for an entry level course on these topics. It is focused on a select and small range of those topics that have the specific pedagogical aims described above.

I use mdBook to build markdown source files into this final output for the website version. I use pandoc to build the EPUB version. The pandoc script file can be found in the GitHub repo.

The content in this book is open access and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Feel free to fork it on GitHub and modify it for your own needs.

The EPUB version includes a cover image. I generated this image using ChatGPT.