Semantic Technologies (Knowledge Graphs and All That)

Semantic Technologies provide easier ways to find, share, reuse and combine information. Prominent examples include Google's Knowledge Graph, Wikipedia's knowledge base sister Wikidata, numerous artificial intelligence projects from Alexa to Siri, and the healthcare ontology SNOMED CT. Various companies are exploring the use of their own enterprise knowledge graphs for improving internal knowledge management with the help of tools such as the graph database management system Neo4j, virtual knowledge graph engine Ontop, and the enterprise knowledge graph platform Stardog. Semantic Technologies are a cross-cutting topic in computer science that involves aspects of data management, publication (exchange formats, data integration), knowledge organisation (ontologies), and advanced analytics (expressive query languages). This module gives an introduction to Semantic Technologies for data analysis, knowledge representation, and data management.

Lecturer: Michael Zakharyaschev, email: zmishaz@gmail.com

Syllabus and Slides

Introduction to the module: Knowledge Graphs, Semantic Web, Linked Data, Wikidata; ontologies and their applications. Lecture slides
Practical work: building ontologies with the Protege editor. The Godfather lab slides OWL ontology
Is XML a semantic technology? A quick overview of XML: the tree model of XML documents, XML Schema, JSON. Querying XML documents with XPath. Lecture slides
Practical work: (1) querying XML using an online; (2) building a pizza ontology lab slides
Resource Description Framework RDF. RDF Schema Lecture slides You can also read the Wikipedia article.
Practical work: building Knowledge Graphs. Exercises with model answers.
SPARQL Query Language. Lecture slides " SPARQL cheat sheet."
Practical work: querying Knowledge Graphs using SPARQL, querying DBpedia.
Wikidata; Querying Wikidata with SPARQL. Lecture slides.
Practical work: querying Wikidata; ontology-based access to the IMDB database using Ontop.
Property Graphs at Neo4j. Lecture slides Querying with Cypher. Lecture slides Graph databases for beginners.
The OWL 2 Web Ontology Language. Lecture slides
Reasoning with description logic. Lecture slides

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.
David Wood, Marsha Zaidman and Luke Ruth. Linked Data. Manning Publications, 2013. ISBN 9781617290398.
Dean Allemang and Jim Hendler. Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist. Morgan Kaufmann, 2008. ISBN 978-0-12-373556-0.
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:

Installing the Protégé Ontology Editor

The Protégé Ontology Editor can be downloaded from http://protege.stanford.edu/.