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

I would say that if you are interested in the philosophical, technical underpinnings 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 “Quantifying 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.