497

Book Reviews

Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, and Liam 
Magee. Towards a Semantic Web: Con-
necting 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 scien-
tific 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 frame-
work for capturing such 
linguistic and structural con-
cepts 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 digital 
content,” critiques the CGML approach 
to interlanguage construction and use-
fully contrasts it with two other extant 
techniques, COAX and OntoMerge, before 
offering a likewise useful analysis of the 
“commensurabilty creation load” (dif-
ficulty/cost of creating an interlanguage) 
of each. Throughout, the authors stress 
the need for “human interpretive intel-
ligence” in creating these linkages. 

The potential for irony here does not 
escape me insofar as CGML is currently 
intended to tie together multiple ontolo-
gies surrounding the publishing industry, 
specifically the print monograph industry, 
and this in an era when many have been 
proudly and loudly and with great exag-
geration heralding the death of books and 
of the libraries that collect them for at least 
the past two decades since I began my ca-
reer in librarianship. (“Was it something 
I said?”) The authors seem to believe, as 
do I, that the print monograph remains 



498 College & Research Libraries September 2011

central to textual communication, and 
especially to scholarly communication. 
Witness the healthy 34 percent increase 
in print book titles published 2002–2009, 
compiled by Bowker: www.bowker-
info.com/bowker/IndustryStats2010.pdf. 
Books are being written; books are being 
printed; books must be collected. Not 
only is the print monograph important, 
but dare I say it’s most important? It is, 
at least, to cultural conservationists like 
librarians. It is heartening to have those 
walking the bleeding edge of semantic 
technologies bolster this notion.

I have to say, this book is in need of 
some editing. There were many places 
where words were left out. The frequently 
convoluted prose didn’t help either (al-
though I’ll be the first to acknowledge 
that giving an author’s style some time to 
rewire your brain often has big payoffs). 
Here is a random example, some narrative 
explaining how the foundation of the no-
tion of “ontology” is “meaning function”:

“The underlying design technique is 
based on the conceptualization of mean-
ing function. The practical solution is to 
stabilize each tag schema as a controlled 
vocabulary or ontology. This is supple-
mented by tag languages that may be 
required, the precise referents and the 
ontologically given structural and con-
ceptual relations between the meaning 
functions to which the tags refer. Schemas 
are used to represent tags paradigmati-
cally, typically presented in taxonomies. 
Tag relations can also be represented as 
narrative, as activity sequences of a syn-
tagmatic variety, and these alternative 
conversational or narrative sequences 
may be represented in user stories and 
flow diagrams. These two devices rep-
resent meaning function at a level of 
abstraction beyond the level of natural 
language. They are tools for the construc-
tion of a relatively stable semantic ground 
below the level of natural language. Now, 
the primary basis for the design of mean-
ing is not the instantiation of meaning in 
the meaning forms of language (although 
this is the equally important but now sec-

ondary concern of stylesheet transforma-
tions). The basis, rather, is the activity and 
conceptual structures of human intention 
and experience, or meaning functions.”

Reading this, I feel the urge to report 
my own activity sequence of a syntag-
matic variety:

If I may use anachronistic library lan-
guage for a moment, we create thesauri to 
represent concepts and the relationships, 
sometimes hierarchical, sometimes not, 
between them; we create them to capture 
human meaning. Practically, we create 
these thesauri so we can better organize 
information, as an aid to our storage and 
retrieval of it. More, these thesauri typi-
cally cohere around disciplinary subject 
areas or domains. And let’s not forget that 
there is always a social and historical and 
political context framing and shaping 
these groupings of concepts, sometimes 
obviously, sometimes insidiously. 

Library of Congress Subject Headings, 
anyone?

As someone with a background in 
philosophy, I enjoyed the philosophi-
cally oriented chapters by Liam Magee 
(RMIT [The Royal Melbourne Institute 
of Technology] University, Australia) and 
learned a lot from them, particularly the 
important two chapters devoted to the 
commensurability/incommensurability 
of knowledge systems. And yet, I can see 
how someone without this interest might 
find them tedious. Reading them defi-
nitely felt like sitting through a graduate 
seminar in the Philosophy of Language: 
informative and enlightening if you’re 
into it, akin to a deep contemplation of the 
intersection of state accounting standards 
with municipal tax laws in historical-
cross-cultural context if you’re not. [Wake 
up!] I think it might have been better to 
divide this single volume into two: one 
for Magee’s writings, and the other for 
the various other chapters, as this would 
have resulted in two more focused works. 
I’m assuming publishing them as one was 
a publishing house decision, as was the 
decision to charge a whopping $110.00 for 
a softcover book.



Book Reviews 499

I would say that if you are interested 
in the philosophical, technical underpin-
nings of knowledge systems and of the 
Semantic Web and semantic technologies 
generally, this is a good book to have due 
to the chapters by Magee. (I found his 
chapter “On commensurability” to be 
something of a tour de force summary of 
some main currents of the past fifty years 
of both Anglophone and Continental 
philosophy, and the chapter following, 
“A framework for commensurability,” 
in particular the subsection “Quantify-
ing commensurability,” to be the most 
novel in the book.) It is also a good book 
for its wealth of sometimes profound 
insights into the evolution of scholarship 
and scientific communication from a 
relatively static print culture into what’s 
already emerged as a protean electronic 
culture, as well as the movement from 
a computational environment largely 
limited to the processing of dumb strings 
of characters to one where the semantics 
of those strings are specified and can be 
programmatically exploited.

This book nicely points the way along 
the emerging path to the future, a path 
where semantically aware technologies as 
simple yet profound as the “microdata” 
functionality in HTML5 and as complex 
as rich disciplinary ontologies and the 
prospect of the “interlanguages” that may 
link them winds through an increasingly 
dense forest of data and the artifacts of 
scholarly and scientific communication.

And this is the forest in which we all 
now live—a forest where each branch of 
every tree bristles with meaning.—Mark 
Cyzyk, Johns Hopkins University.

William Baker and Gerald N. Wachs. 
Tom Stoppard: A Bibliographical History. 
London and New Castle, Del.: The 
British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 
2010. xlviii, 446p. & 1 CD-ROM. alk. 
paper, $79.95 (ISBN 9780712349666 / 
9781584562856). LC-2010-052520.

This impressive reference work attempts 
to document the complete creative output 
of Tom Stoppard in print, on stage, and 

on screen from his earliest journalism 
up to January 2010. As a comprehensive 
primary bibliography, it has no equal; 
Malcolm Page’s File on Stoppard (London: 
Metheun, 1986) is similar in structure 
but twenty-five years old and relatively 
slim, while David Bratt’s Tom Stoppard: A 
Reference Guide (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982) is 
primarily an index of reviews and ends in 
1980. Baker and Wachs attempt to identify 
all works authored by Stoppard, exclud-
ing those where his primary role was 
as performer, director, or narrator. This 
limitation, combined with Stoppard’s vast 
number of interviews and public appear-
ances, often in support of social justice 
causes, means that this bibliography is 
not fully comprehensive, but it comes 
as close as can be reasonably expected. 
Indeed, the only criticism this reviewer 
can offer of its scope concerns the publi-
cation date; since Mr. Stoppard is still, at 
seventy-three, a prolific writer and active 
public figure, this volume will need to be 
updated at some point to document the 
work between January 2010 and his death.

Author William Baker, a University 
Trustee Professor and Distinguished Re-
search Professor at Northern Illinois 
University specializing in literary bibliog-
raphy, previously published Harold Pinter: 
A Bibliographical History (London: British 
Library, 2005), and this book follows the 
structure and method of that earlier work. 
His co-author, Gerald N. Wachs, is a New 
York dermatologist described on the book 
jacket as “a foremost collector of Tom 
Stoppard material” who has attempted 
“to gather together all known printings 
and unpublished materials of Stoppard.” 
In addition to Dr. Wachs’ collection, the 
authors also mined the Harry Ransom 
Center at the University of Texas at Austin 
(home to Stoppard’s papers since 1991), 
various library catalogs, and the Brit-
ish National Sound Archive to identify 
printed and broadcast items.

The introduction provides useful 
information on the book’s organization, 
methodology, and sources, as well as an 
interesting discussion of the complexities