First Technology Transfer

Standard and Advanced Technical Training, Consultancy and Mentoring

Course SWEB101 - Introduction to the Semantic Web - RDF, RDFS, OWL and Ontologies

Duration: 5 Days

Intended Audience

This course is aimed at semantic web ontology content designers, architects, and developers who need to understand the concepts and technologies underpinning the Semantic Web. Attendees are expected to have some familiarity with XML.

Synopsis

The emphasis of this course is on providing an understanding of the various problems involved in building semantic web applications and how they have been addressed by RDF, RDFS and OWL. The course also covers issues involved with knowledge engineering issues associated with Ontology building, and reasoning over Ontologies using reasonsers based on Description Logics (DLs). The course will introduce the Semantic Web Query Language SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and Query Language) as well as SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) and SQWRL (Semantic Query-Enhanced Web Rule Language).

Contents:

  • Overview of the Semantic Web
    • Information vs. knowledge
    • Knowledge services
    • Semantics as a branch of philosophy and linguistics
    • Semantics as a branch of computer science
  • Overview of XML
    • Notation and rules
    • Namespaces
    • XMLS - XML Schema
    • XSLT and XPath
  • Resource Description Framework - RDF
    • RDF triples
    • RDF Semantic Network
    • XML Syntax for RDF
    • RDF containers
    • RDF Knowledge Bases
    • RDF Stores
  • RDF Schema (RDFS)
    • Using RDFS to construct vocabularies for particular domains
    • Hierarchies of properties
    • RDF Syntax for RDF Schema
    • RDF instance declaration
  • Web Ontology Language (OWL)
    • OWL family of languages (OWL-Lite, OWL-DL, OWL-Full)
    • Things that can be specified in OWL
    • A class as a union, intersection or complement of other classes
    • Specifying a class as being disjoint from some other class
    • Synonymous classes
    • Cardinality restrictions on properties
    • Transitivity and uniqueness of properties
    • OWL Lite
      • RDF syntax for OWL Lite
      • Asserting properties as equivalent, inverse, symmetric, transitive
    • OWL-DL and OWL Full
      • Direct enumeration of members of a class
      • Disjointness between two classes
    • OWL Full extensions to OWL-DL
  • Reasoning and Description Logics
    • Overview of logic and reasoning
    • Kinds of reasoning
      • Planning
      • Deduction
      • Query languages and SPARQL (Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language)
    • Description Logics and Description Languages
    • TBox (ontology) and ABox (knowledge base) as concepts
    • Reasoning - Inferring Knowledge
    • Reasoning techniques
    • Rule languages - SWRL and SQWRL
  • Agent Communication - Overview, Models and Examples
  • Semantic Web Services
    • Web Service Architecture
    • Web Service Description Language
    • Knowledge Services - an overview
    • Service Ontologies