Books like Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business

Disclosure: I am a computer scientist, and semantic web concepts are nothing new to me. They began to emerge in academia more than a decade ago, but have yet to gain wide-scale adoption for reasons I will not go into here. It was very clear within the first few chapters that my own idyllic vision of the semantic future departs somewhat from Siegel's predictions. My review is thus significantly skewed.In terms of visioneering, this is a 5-star presentation. In "Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business", Siegel presents what I call a "marketers vision" of the semantic web. He is able to cover a breadth of current industries with in-depth ideas of how efficiencies could be introduced by large-scale systemic semantic improvements. The provided user stories (that fill the majority of the book) are most definitely quote worthy, and will hopefully spur all industries to take progressive action towards open data and standards. I would encourage all non-technical business decision makers unfamiliar with the principles of the semantic web to start with Pull for a solid value proposition.My biggest disappointment with Pull is that the arguments essentially end with the use cases. Siegel addresses few to none of the actual reasons that have prevented massive forward progress from private industries. In particular, issues such as transitive trust, caching coherency, service availability, and many more an issue are rarely if ever even mentioned, which is unfortunate since some of them are Achilles' heels. Additionally, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)--a style that *has* achieved notable industry adoption--arguably overlaps in many ways with the semantic web in both technology and business value. Yet, this was not even mentioned. Understanding the benefits--from a computer science perspective--is actually the *easy* part. We don't need another paper explaining this. What we *do* need are many more reproducible concrete strategies and case studies documenting successful enterprise migrations from massive, proprietary infrastructures to scalable, open, semantically queryable ones.I was also disappointed by teh too frequent occurrence of awkward phrasings giving me the impression that Siegel may not quite be down with the details of how current web systems work under the covers: even those implementing semantic standards. (And some statements are in direct contradiction of principles popularized by the web 2.0 movement.) For example, here are a few awkward examples that may raise an eyebrow from those in the industry:"It doesn’t take a computer scientist to see that there won’t be any more Apple or Windows operating systems, at least for end users. These dinosaurs will go extinct as the world of real-time access and streaming to cheap, or even free, displays takes their place. I expect it will be a ten-year process.""Apply the semantic web acid test: .... Is it on the web, as opposed to in a database?""Scrub your data...Bring in consultants to find inaccuracies and insist on a Six Sigma approach to data integrity."There are too many holes to mention, but the conclusion is that Pull delivers 5-star quality for packaging of potential benefits, but 1-star for execution depth of any meaningful detail. Based on the title of the book I fully expected both.