James Hendler is the Director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications and the Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (New York, NY, USA). He also is the director of the RPI-IBM Artificial Intelligence Research Collaboration and serves as amember of the board of the UK's charitableWeb Science Trust and the advisory board of timbr.ai. James has authored over 400 books, technical papers, and articles. He is a former member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, and is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the British Computer Society (BCS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) technical societies. He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where he created the DARPA AgentMarkup Program(DAML) which helped to fund the science and creation of the SemanticWeb. James was the first computer scientist to serve on the board of reviewing editors for Science, is the former editor-in-chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems, and is currently coeditor of the Data Intelligence journal jointly published byMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press and the Chinese Academy of Science. In 2010, he was named one of the 20 most innovative professors in America by Playboymagazine and was selected as an "Internet Web Expert" by the US government. In 2016, became a member of the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information and in 2018 was elected a Fellow of the US National Academy of Public Administration.

Enterprises have made amazing advances by taking advantage of data about their business to provide predictions and understanding of their customers, markets, and products. But as the world of business becomes more interconnected and global, enterprise data is no long a monolith; it is just a part of a vast web of data. Managing data on a world-wide scale is a key capability for any business today.

The Semantic Web treats data as a distributed resource on the scale of the World Wide Web, and incorporates features to address the challenges of massive data distribution as part of its basic design. The aim of the first two editions was to motivate the Semantic Web technology stack from end-to-end; to describe not only what the Semantic Web standards are and how they work, but also what their goals are and why they were designed as they are. It tells a coherent story from beginning to end of how the standards work to manage a world-wide distributed web of knowledge in a meaningful way.

The third edition builds on this foundation to bring Semantic Web practice to enterprise. Fabien Gandon joins Dean Allemang and Jim Hendler, bringing with him years of experience in global linked data, to open up the story to a modern view of global linked data. While the overall story is the same, the examples have been brought up to date and applied in a modern setting, where enterprise and global data come together as a living, linked network of data. Also included with the third edition, all of the data sets and queries are available online for study and experimentation at data.world/swwo.