The fact that the book comes out of NASA is a good indicator of how some large organisations are taking seriously the rise of the Semantic Web. It explains how the current Web (the so-called 1.0 version) has its limitations, despite its huge success. That success is due to the construction of webpages, that are meant for human visual and manual comprehension. The mixture of presentation and content in a typical webpage is immensely aggravating if you want to construct ways to extract meaning.
In an effort to rise above 1.0, the book talks about many software technologies that have arisen. The base technology is surely XML. From the text, you can think of XML as HTML, except that you, the author, get to define the tags. Whereas HTML comes with hardwired tags.
But while XML is a great start, the problems only begin. While you, a human, can now define tags, the meaning and intent of what you define still has to be discerned by others. If this can only be done manually, then we are only slightly better off than 1.0. How to do this programmatically? This, in essence, is what the book devotes most of its space to. Ontologies have to be defined. Terms and meanings tied together. Then there are Web Services. So that organisations can build automated interactions with others. Perhaps to facilitate e-commerce. Or to extend and automate a supply chain. An entire panoply of standards has arisen; described as WS-*. Like Web Service Description Language. And Web Service Business Process Execution Language. Very easy to trip over some of the book's jargon. Unfortunately, you have to get used to it.
Much is still unresolved. You get an appreciation of where we are, and how far we have to go.