Overview

This course on Semantic Web Technologies is for a) doctoral students in computer science, as well as for b) participants from the public and private sectors. The main component of the course is an intense week of lectures and hands-on sessions. Additional, doctoral students who are taking the course will have to work on lab assignments, and on a project or a term paper.

The course will be delivered by experienced teachers who are part of the Semantic Web research group of the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA) at Linköping University.

If you are interested in attending the week of lectures and hands-on sessions (or parts thereof), please register at our registration form before February 28.

Goals

After attending the course you should:

• Be able to understand and explain the basic ideas of the Semantic Web, including Linked Data and ontologies, and its related standards (RDF, OWL, SPARQL, ...)
• Be able to understand, retrieve, load in a triple store, query (online or offline) and use existing RDF datasets from the Web
• Be able to use an ontology engineering methodology and ontology engineering tools to design and formalize a high-quality OWL ontology, based on a specific usage scenario (set of requirements)
• Be able to evaluate, align, and repair an OWL ontology, using current methods and tools for ontology alignment, evaluation, and repair
• Be able to understand and to explain how ontologies are typically used in applications
• Be able to build an application based on Semantic Web technologies (e.g., by using RDF data, OWL ontologies, etc.)
• Have a basic idea of the current research topics and open research problems in the field

Tentative Schedule for the Week

The intensive week of lectures and hands-on sessions will take place in week 11 of 2018 (March 12-16) at LiU's Campus Valla in Linköping. The schedule for this week is as follows (note that some things might change slightly):

• Monday (March 12)
  13:00-13:35 Welcome and introduction (slides)
  13:35-14:35 Introduction to the Semantic Web vision (slides)
    10 mins break
  14:45-15:45 Introduction to RDF and Linked Data (slides)
    15 mins break
  16:00-17:00 Introduction to ontologies (slides)
• Tuesday (March 13)
  9:00-11:00 Introduction to the RDF query language SPARQL (slides)
  11:00-12:00 Hands-on: SPARQL
    lunch break
  13:00-14:15 RDF triplestores (slides)
  14:15-15:00 Hands-on: triplestores
  15:00-16:30 Making available RDF data online (slides)
                        Hands-on: RDF publishing (try at home)
  16:30-17:00 Understanding datasets (slides)
• Wednesday (March 14)
  09:00-10:00 Basic OWL modeling (slides)
  10:00-11:00 Hands-on: basic OWL modeling using a tool
  11:00-11:30 Modeling methodology and requirements management (slides)
  11:30-12:00 Hands-on: creating requirements
    lunch break
  13:00-14:15 Hands-on: creating an ontology from given requirements
  14:15-14:30 Introduction to ontology design patterns (ODPs) (slides, including also the next item below)
  14:30-14:45 ODP-based modeling methodology
  14:45-15:00 Introduction to the group project
  15:00-17:00 Hands-on: collaborative group project
• Thursday (March 15)
  09:00-11:45 Introduction to Description Logics (unfortunately cancelled due to illness - slides are available for those who are interested)
    lunch break
  13:00-15:00 Hands-on: collaborative group project continued (including coffee)
  15:00-15:30 Wrap-up and discussion of potential solutions and experiences
  15:30-17:00 Ontology alignment and debugging (including tool demos) (slides)
• Friday (March 16)
  9:00-10:00 Introduction to constraints in RDF (SHACL) (tutorial slides and SHACL by example slides)
  10:00-10:30 Hands-on: SHACL
    15 mins break
  10:45-11:00 Data quality and data cleaning in RDF (slides)
  11:00-12:00 revisit learning outcomes, etc.

Instructions and requirements for PhD students

In order for PhD students to receive credits/certificates for attending the course you need to do three things: 1) Actively participate in all the lectures and hands-on sessions during the week, 2) complete a set of assignments (listed below), and 3) select and complete a small project to be done after the course week (optional, but needed to receive the full 6 credits of the course).

Assignments to be completed are (no hard deadline, but preferably complete and submit within one week from hands-on date):

• Complete and hand in all the SPARQL queries from Hands-on: SPARQL via e-mail to Olaf
• Complete and hand in the solution to Hands-on: basic OWL modeling using a tool, send result via e-mail to Eva
• Complete and hand in the solution to Hands-on: creating an ontology from given requirements, send result via e-mail to Eva
• Complete and hand in the solution to at least 2 modules from Hands-on: collaborative group project, and one module that integrates at least 2 other modules, send result via e-mail to Eva. If you do not manage to complete two modules + one integrated module during the session, it is ok to integrate the two modules that you make yourself. Otherwise what you send could be two modules that you created yourself + one integrated module that integrates two modules from other people in the group.
• Complete and send all the SHACL shapes you wrote in the Hands-on: SHACL via e-mail to Robin

For the project after the course, please discuss the selection of topic as soon as possible (preferably within the coming week) with anyone of the course teachers. You can select between these two main categories of projects:

• Reading projects: select a topic from the course, read at least 5 research articles in that area, write a summary of those articles (5-10 pages)
• Practical project: select at technology discussed in the course, apply it on something related to your own PhD project, write a summary of what you did and your experience/evaluation of the technology (5-10 pages) - alternatively: a practical project provided by us

For the project you will be assigned one of the teachers as your point of contact, and although there is no hard deadline you should agree on a submission date, preferably within the next month, with your assigned teacher.

Suggestions for further reading

Further reading on RDF and linked-data topics:

• TBA

Further reading on ontology engineering:

• Ontology tutorial for Protege (older version), using the Pizza ontology as an example.
• Allemang and Hendler: Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist
• Hitzler, P., Gangemi, A., Janowicz, K., Krisnadhi, A.A., Presutti, V.: Ontology Engineering with Ontology Design Patterns: Foundations and Applications (Contains for instance a chapter describing the XD methodology)
• Videos from a slightly outdated (10 year old) conference tutorial on the basics of the semantic Web. Many basic concepts still apply, but note that new versions of the standards (e.g. OWL2) has appeared since.

Further reading on DL:

• Baader, Calvanese, McGuinness, Nardi, Patel-Schneider. The Description Logic Handbook. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Donini, Lenzerini, Nardi, Schaerf, Reasoning in description logics. Principles of knowledge representation. CSLI publications. pp 191-236. 1996.
• dl.kr.org

Further reading on SHACL and related topics:

• The W3C SHACL recommendation

Teachers

The course will be organized by the Semantic Web research group of the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA) at Linköping University. In particular, the course will be delivered by the following experienced teachers of the group who have in-depth expertise in the various topics covered by the course:

• Olaf Hartig is an Assistant Professor. He has a broad knowledge on topics related to the management of data and databases. His specific areas of expertise in this context focus on data on the Semantic Web and on graph data, as well as on problems of federated data management in which data is distributed over multiple, autonomous and/or heterogeneous data sources. Regarding these topics, Olaf's interests range from systems-building related research all the way to theoretical foundations. Olaf presented several tutorials at top international conferences in the Semantic Web area including WWW (2010, 2013, 2017) and ISWC (2008, 2009, 2017), and he was lecturer at the 2011 Indian-Summer School on Linked Data.
• Eva Blomqvist is a Senior Researcher. She has mainly worked on research problems related to ontologies an ontology engineering, and was one of the researchers who initially proposed the notion of ontology design patterns, about 12 years ago. During her PhD she worked on semi-automatic ontology development, so-called ontology learning. Eva has also been actively involved in the development, refinement and evaluation of the eXtreme Design ontology engineering methodology, which was the first agile ontology engineering methodology when it was proposed in 2009. More recently Eva has been involved in several projects applying ontologies in various contexts, e.g. in decision support systems, and also using ontologies and other Semantic Web technologies to perform semantic complex event processing to make sense of streaming data.
• Patrick Lambrix is a Professor and he leads the Database and Web Information Systems Group at IDA. Patrick has over 20 years of experience in research related to knowledge engineering, which includes aspects of Semantic Web, ontologies, and databases. Recent highlights include pioneering work in ontology alignment and ontology completion and debugging resulting in unique and award-winning systems. The systems and techniques developed by his group have been and are being used in different domains such as life sciences, animal health surveillance, libraries and materials design.