Semantic Web (autumn 2011)

Course Structure and Assessment

• 33 lecture, tutorial and lab hours over 11 weeks
• 1 assessed coursework
• written examination in May
• final mark = CW (20%) + exam (80%)

Syllabus and Slides

1. The history of the Semantic Web. Syntactic vs semantic web. Ontologies in (Computer) Science. slides lab Pizza ontology
2. The layered approach to the Semantic Web. XML, the tree model of XML documents, XML Schema. Querying XML documents, XPath. slides (see also this W3C page) tutorial lab
3. RDF (Resource Description Framework). RDF Schema. RDF/S semantics. slides tutorial (SPARQL) Appendix 1: Sets and relations Appendix 2: RDF/S semantics
4. Requirements for ontology languages. From RDFS to OWL. Three species of OWL. OWL ontologies. slides tutorial (OWL ontology)
5. Ontology engineering. slides tutorial OWL ontology
6. Reasoning with OWL. Open vs closed worlds. Constructors. slides tutorial
7. Description logics. slides solutions to exercises
8. Reasoning with description logics. Tableau algorithms. slides tutorial Exercises with some solutions
9. OWL as a description logic. slides More exercises with some solutions

Course Notes

• All the material needed for a successful exam is covered by the slides, exercises below, and the coursework.
• Recommended textbooks:
• Pascal Hitzler, Markus Kroetzsch and Sebastian Rudolph. Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies. Chapman & Hall, 2009. ISBN 978-1420090505. Supplementary materials and slides are available here.
• Grigoris Antoniou and Frank van Harmelen. A Semantic Web Primer. MIT Press, 2004. ISBN 0-262-01210-3.
• Dean Allemang and Jim Hendler. Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist. Morgan Kaufmann, 2008. ISBN 978-0-12-373556-0.
• Background reading:
  • Franz Baader, Diego Calvanese, Deborah McGuinness, Daniele Nardi and Peter Patel-Schneider. The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation and Applications. Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521781760.
  • Thomas Passin. Explorers Guide to the Semantic Web. Manning, 2004. ISBN 978-1-932394-20-6.
• Web resources:
  • XML
  • XML schema
  • RDF
  • An introduction to RDF
  • OWL guide and Semantic Web tutorials
  • Ontology design
  • Semantic Web search
  • Protégé
  • Protégé tutorial
  • An introduction to description logics

Installing Protégé Ontology Editor

Coursework