Readings

Textbook

The textbook in INFO216 is Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, Second Edition: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL by Dean Allemang and James Hendler (Jun 3, 2011). Morgan Kaufmann. The whole book is obligatory reading.

Other materials

In addition, the materials listed below for each lecture are either mandatory or suggested reading. Because we are moving from Java to Python this spring, the reading list is not final. We will add more materials to each lecture in the next few weeks.

The lectures and lectures notes are also part of the curriculum.

Make sure you download the electronic resources to your own computer in good time before the exam. This is your own responsibility. That way you are safe if a site becomes unavailable or somehow damaged the last few days before the exam.

Note: to download some of the papers, you need to be inside UiB's network. Either use a computer directly on the UiB network or connect to your UiB account through VPN.

Lectures

Below are the mandatory and suggested readings for each lecture. All the textbook chapters are mandatory. Java-based readings are also available as an alternative to the Python-based materials.

Lecture 1: Knowledge Graphs

Themes:

• Web of Data
• INFO216
• RDFLib
• The programming project

Mandatory readings:

• Chapters 1-2 in Allemang & Hendler. In the text book.
• Tim Berners-Lee talks about the semantic web (mandatory)
• rdflib 4.2.2 materials:
  • Main page
  • Getting started with RDFLib
• Slides from the lecture

Useful materials:

• RDFLib API documentation (useful for the labs and project)
• RDFLib's GitHub page

Lecture 2: RDF

Themes:

• RDF
• Programming RDF in Python
• Finding datasets and vocabularies for your projects

Mandatory readings:

• Chapter 3 in Allemang & Hendler. In the text book.
• W3C's RDF 1.1 Primer (mandatory)
• We also continue with the rdflib 4.2.2 materials from lecture 1:
  • Loading and saving RDF
  • Creating RDF triples
  • Navigating Graphs
  • Utilities and convenience functions
• Slides from the lecture

Useful materials:

• W3C's RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax (cursory)
• RDFLib API documentation (same as Lecture 1)
• RDF Data Visualization tools

Lecture 3: SPARQL

Themes:

• SPARQL
• SPARQL Update
• Programming SPARQL and SPARQL Update in Python

Mandatory readings:

• Chapter 5 in Allemang & Hendler. In the text book.
• SPARQL 1.1 Update Language (Sections 1-3 are obligatory)
• Slides from the lecture
• rdflib 4.2.2 materials:
  • Querying with SPARQL

Useful materials:

• SPARQL 1.1 Query Language
• SPARQL 1.1 Update Language (the rest of it)
• SPARQL 1.1 Overview
• RDFLib API documentation (same as Lecture 1)
• SPARQL 1.1 Cheat Sheet

Lecture 4: Application Architecture

Themes:

• Application components
• Triple stores
• Visualisation

Mandatory readings:

• Chapter 4 in Allemang & Hendler. In the text book.
• Blazegraph:
  • Introduction - About Blazegraph
  • Getting started
  • SPARQL Extensions - Full Text Search, GeoSpatial Search, Refication Done Right
• Slides from the lecture

Useful materials:

• Blazegraph
  • The rest of it...
• Skjæveland 2012: Sgvizler. Paper.
• Sgvizler 0.6
• Lohmann et al. (2019): Visualizing Ontologies with VOWL. Semantic Web Journal. Paper.
• VOWL: Visual Notation for OWL Ontologies

Lecture 5: RDFS

Themes:

• RDFS
• Axioms, rules and entailment
• Programming RDFS in Python

Mandatory readings:

• Chapters 6-7 in Allemang & Hendler. In the text book.
• W3C's RDF Schema 1.1 (mandatory)
• Slides from the lecture

Useful materials:

• W3C's RDF 1.1 Semantics (cursory, except the axioms and entailments in sections 8 and 9, which we will review in the lecture)
• OWL-RL adds inference capability on top of RDFLib. To use it, copy the owlrl folder into your project folder, next to your Python files, and import it with import owlrl.
• OWL-RL documentation (most likely more detailed than you will need - check the Python Examples first
• Inference and Thruth Maintenance in Blazegraph

Lecture 6: RDFS Plus

Themes:

• Basic OWL concepts
• Axioms, rules and entailments
• Programming basic OWL in Python

Mandatory readings:

• Chapter 8 in Allemang & Hendler. In the text book.
• Slides from the lecture.

Useful materials (cursory):

• OWL 2 Document Overview
• OWL2 Primer
• OWL 2 Quick Reference Guide
• OWL2 RDF-Based Semantics
• The OWL-RL materials from Lecture 5

Lecture 7 and 8: Vocabularies

Themes:

• LOD vocabularies and ontologies

Mandatory readings:

• Chapters 9-10 and 13 in Allemang & Hendler. In the text book.
• Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV)
• LODstats
• Slides from the lecture
• Additional slides about the News Angler project

Useful materials:

• Vocabularies:
  • SKOS - Simple Knowledge Organization System Home Page
  • schema.org - Full Hierarchy
  • Dublin Core (DC)
  • Friend of a Friend (FOAF)
  • geo: World Geodetic Standard (WGS) 84
  • The RDF Data Cube Vocabulary
  • Annotating vocabulary descriptions (VANN)
  • Vocabulary Status (VS)
  • Creative Commons (CC) Vocabulary
  • Vocabulary of Interlinked Datasets (VoID)
  • Provenance Interchange (PROV)
  • Event Ontology (event)
  • Time ontology in OWL (time, OWL-time)
  • Timeline Ontology (tl)
  • Biographical Information (BIO)
  • Semantic Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC)
  • Bibliographic Ontology (bibo)
  • Music Ontology (mo)

This is what we expect you to know about each vocabulary: Its purpose and where and how it can be used. You should know its most central 3-6 classes and properties be able to explain its basic structure. It is less important to get all the names and prefixes 100% right: we do not expect you to learn every little detail by heart. schema.org is less important because you have already had about it in INFO116.

• The SLR-KG4News dataset from the News Angler project

Lecture 9 and 10: Linked Data Resources

Themes:

• Important Linked Open Datasets
  • DBpedia
  • LinkedGeoData
  • GeoNames
  • Wikidata
  • and others

Mandatory readings:

• Bizer, C., Heath, T., & Berners-Lee, T. (2009). Linked data-the story so far. Semantic services, interoperability and web applications: emerging concepts, 205-227.
• Färber, M., Ell, B., Menne, C., & Rettinger, A. (2015). A Comparative Survey of DBpedia, Freebase, OpenCyc, Wikidata, and YAGO. Semantic Web Journal, July.
• The Linking Open Data (LOD) cloud diagram
• Slides from the lecture

Useful materials:

• LODstats
• Dbpedia
• Wikidata
• GeoNames
• WordNet - A lexical database for English
• BabelNet

Lecture 11 and 12: Web APIs

Themes:

• JSON, JSON-LD
• Semantic web services
• Semantic workflows

Mandatory readings:

• JSON Syntax (mandatory)
• Section 2 in W3C's JSON-LD 1.1 Processing Algorithms and API (mandatory)
• Slides from the lecture

Useful materials:

• JSON for Linked Data (supplementary)
  • What is Linked Data? Short video introduction to Linked Data by Manu Sporny
  • What is JSON-LD? Short video introduction to JSON-LD by Manu Sporny

Lecture 13: OWL

Themes:

• Advanced OWL
• Axioms, rules and entailments
• Programming advanced OWL in Python

Mandatory readings:

• Chapters 11-12 in Allemang & Hendler. In the text book.
• Slides from the lecture

Useful materials:

• OWL 2 Document Overview (cursory)
• OWL2 Primer (cursory)
• OWL 2 Quick Reference Guide (cursory)
• VOWL: Visual Notation for OWL Ontologies (cursory)
• WebVOWL (cursory)

Lecture 14: OWL DL

Themes:

• Description logic
• Decision problems
• OWL-DL
• Programming with OWL-DL reasoners in Python

Mandatory readings:

• Slides from the lecture

Useful materials:

• Nardi & Brachman: Introduction to Description Logics. Chapter 1 in Description Logic Handbook. (cursory)
• Baader & Nutt: Basic Description Logics. Chapter 2 in Description Logic Handbook.
  • Cursory, quickly gets mathematical after the introduction. In particular, sections 2.2.2.3-4 about fixpoint semantics apply to TBoxes with cyclic definitions, which we do not consider in this course. We also do not consider the stuff about rules, epistemics, and reasoning from section 2.2.5 on.
• Complexity of Reasoning in Description Logics. Powered by Evgeny Zolin. (informative)

Lecture 15: Ontology Development

Themes:

• Ontology Development 101 method

Mandatory readings:

• Chapters 14-16 in Allemang & Hendler. In the text book.
• Noy & McGuinness (2001): Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology. Paper.
• Slides from the lecture

Useful materials:

• Sicilia et al. (2012): Empirical findings on ontology metrics. (very cursory paper)

 

INFO216, UiB, 2017-2020, Andreas L. Opdahl (c)