Semantic Technologies

 

Over­view

Accord­ing to a recent Price­Wa­ter­house­Coopers report, “Semantic Web tech­no­lo­gies could revo­lu­tion­ize enter­prise decision mak­ing and inform­a­tion shar­ing”. By con­nect­ing more flex­ible, stand­ard­ized ways to model and share data with best prac­tices for identi­fy­ing the mean­ing (or, at the very least, the source) of descript­ive terms, Semantic Web tech­no­lo­gies open up new pos­sib­il­it­ies for devel­op­ing applic­a­tions that work across the web or behind your fire­wall. In this course, we’ll learn about the build­ing blocks of the Semantic Web such as the RDF data model, the RDFa ver­sion that lets you embed machine-readable facts (or “triples”) into web pages, the SPARQL query lan­guage, and the Web Onto­logy Lan­guage (OWL) for defin­ing vocab­u­lar­ies and term rela­tion­ships. We’ll also learn about the open source and com­mer­cial soft­ware that lets you you assemble these build­ing blocks into applic­a­tions that help you get more out of your own data and out of the increas­ing amount of avail­able “linked” data on the pub­lic web.

Classes for 2009

The Semantic Web: an Overview

Taught by Bob DuCh­arme.

The Semantic Web is a set of stand­ards and best prac­tices for shar­ing data and the semantics of that data over the web for use by applic­a­tions. What are the stand­ards? What are the best prac­tices? What does it mean to share semantics along with data, and how can that make the data more use­ful? How do applic­a­tions use data from across the web?

In this class, we’ll look at the high-level answers to these ques­tions, take a tour of the the tech­no­logy and the acronyms, and see how they all fit together before the day’s remain­ing speak­ers dig deeper into the prac­tical use of these technologies.

Intro­duc­tion to Linked Data

Taught by Leigh Dodds.

Linked Data is a set of prin­ciples for pub­lish­ing data across the pub­lic web to max­im­ise its poten­tial for reuse. An increas­ingly large amount of data is being pub­lished using these guidelines, across a num­ber of dis­cip­lines and indus­tries, ran­ging from crowd-sourced data (e.g. dbpe­dia), media out­lets (e.g. the BBC) and the US and UK gov­ern­ments. As momentum builds across the Linked Data approach to data pub­lish­ing, more pub­lish­ers and developers are explor­ing how to share their data in this way, and won­der­ing how to make use of the exist­ing resources to cre­ate new applic­a­tions or enrich exist­ing resources. In this class we’ll learn how to pub­lish Linked Data tak­ing a best prac­tices approach, as well as look­ing out how to con­sume linked data that has already been pub­lished. The les­sons will be illus­trated using the Talis Plat­form and some open source Linked Data browsers.

SPARQL

Taught by Andy Seaborne.

SPARQL is the stand­ard W3C query lan­guage for semantic web applic­a­tions. It has brought together the exper­i­ence of a num­ber of RDF query lan­guages into a method for extract­ing inform­a­tion from data rep­res­en­ted in RDF, from small to large.

This ses­sion will provide a solid ground­ing in SPARQL. After demon­strat­ing how power­ful some very simple SPARQL quer­ies can be, we will take a prac­tical approach to look­ing at the key fea­tures and then explore the prin­ciples under­pin­ning the SPARQL query lan­guage. After a prac­tical ses­sion, we will fin­ish by look­ing at SPARQL imple­ment­a­tions and see­ing where the lan­guage will evolve.

Onto­lo­gies, OWL and Protégé

Taught by Duncan Hull.

This ses­sion will intro­duce onto­lo­gies and the W3C Web Onto­logy Lan­guage (OWL) using the Open Source Protégé editor http://protege.stanford.edu. With examples, we will demon­strate the added value of semantic metadata to reason with and auto­mat­ic­ally clas­sify know­ledge in more intel­li­gent ways. We will also describe where OWL fits in with related semantic web stand­ards and linked data on the Web.