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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LIBRARIANSHIP, 3(1), 105-106 

ISSN:2474-3542 

 

Practical Ontologies for Information Professionals. By David Stuart. Chicago, IL: ALA Neal-
Shuman, 2016. 184 p. $88. ISBN-13: 9780838915110 
 
In recent years, there has been an increase of interest in ontologies in the information profession 
that leads to a good number of articles and books published on this topic. For many years, librarians 
and other information professionals have been working with the semantic web which is the major 
driving force of the increasing attention in ontologies that involve in bringing data from various 
places to a dataset. The author of this book, David Stuart, explains the importance of ontologies 
for information discovery, introduces how information professionals can develop new ontologies 
and interrogate existing ontologies. 

Stuart introduces ontologies with 7 chapters. Firstly, he defines the concept of ontologies. “An 
ontology is a formal representation of knowledge with rich semantic relationships between terms.” 
He clarifies the differences between ontology and comparable terms that are often not 
differentiated to those who are new to the field. Those terms are taxonomies, thesaurus, and 
vocabularies. Readers can learn the concepts and terminology of the information organization 
through the book. The author also explains the functions of ontologies. With more and more data 
being created in the digital world, ontologies will help aid information retrieval, information 
management, and discovery of new information. Stuart proceeds to explain the relationships 
between ontologies and the semantic web. The library community has been engaged in publishing 
bibliographic metadata with linked data. The book provides librarians with ideas of how ontologies 
can be utilized to empower the linked data and the semantic web. In Chapter 3, he introduces some 
existing ontologies, their application, and roles for the digital world. The ontology languages 
discussed in the book include Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS), Web Ontology 
Language (OWL) and Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) which are extensively 
used for the semantic web and adopted by the library community. 

In Chapter 4 and 5, Stuart introduces how to adopt ontologies, the tools for examining 
ontologies, the techniques for selecting ontologies and the approaches to reuse ontologies to 
accommodate one’s own needs or to build new ontologies. He explains the steps for the librarians 
and information professionals to develop ontologies. In the following chapter, Stuart provides an 
insightful analysis on some interrogating tools such as RDF Query Language (SPARQL) and 
semantic web crawlers. The last chapter is a prospective conclusion on ontologies. Stuart is 
optimistic about the future of ontologies and thinks that ontologies will continue to come in a 
variety of forms, “open or closed, formal or informal, centralized or distributed.” Stuart states that 
library and information professional should recognize the values of ontologies in data sharing, the 
possibility of the semantic web and the expansion of the library and information professional’s 
work in the use of existing ontologies, or the development of new ontologies. With the new 
development of technology in the information profession, librarians no longer solely work with 
the library bibliographic metadata. There is a need for librarians to get familiar with the new trends 



Chen & Ngu / International Journal of Librarianship 3(1) 

  

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in the information age. Linked Data has been the hot topic of the web technologies in the library 
profession in recent years, and library professionals have been actively working in the areas. 
Librarians or information professionals will have many opportunities to work in these areas in the 
future. Nevertheless, ontologies are only one of the tools for semantic web in the information 
technology.  

This book will be useful for LIS students, librarians and information professionals who do not 
have much background information about ontology and would like to get some basic concepts on 
ontologies and on how to build ontologies. The structure of the book is straightforward with main 
topics clearly laid out. The ideas and information are conveyed concisely. The limitation is that the 
book does not cover comprehensive hands-on practice with particular pieces of software for the 
development of ontologies. It focuses more on the principles and strategies of many aspects of 
ontologies. Besides, the book emphasizes informal ontologies rather than formal ontologies. To 
develop more formal and professional ontologies, one needs more extensive knowledge of 
computer science in addition to knowledge and skills on ontologies.  

The book provides many resources about ontology if readers would like to explore this area 
in depth. Finally, it inspires some ideas for librarians to develop subject-specific ontology beyond 
creating bibliographic data.  
 
--- Suzhen Chen, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, HI, USA 
--- Lucy W. Ngu, Lone Star College-University Park, TX, USA