The term "Semantic Web" was coined in 2001 when Tim Berners Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web) and others presented a vision of an intelligent web in the "Scientific American". The Semantic Web aims at the development of methods that help to automate the interpretation, aggregation, evaluation and comparison of information on the Web.

The courses provide an overview over existing Semantic Web Technology, especially concerning

1. standardized markup languages for an explicit and machine processable representation of information content
2. common, standardized vocabularies for phrasing queries and as a fundament for comparing information (ontologies)
3. extraction and explicit representation of existing information basing on common vocabularies and standardized annotation languages

• lecture: Dr. York Sure
• lab and practicum: Livia Predoiu, Prof. Dr. Heiner Stuckenschmidt
  

Two separate Semantic Web Technologies courses are offered:
1. a course which consists of a lecture (1 Block, 2 SWS) + a lab (1 SWS)
2. a practicum/project which consists of an extended lab (1 Block, 4 SWS) and is held together with the lab of the other course

Dates:

• lecture: Tuesdays 8:30-11:45 am (bi-weekly) in A5, room C014, starting from 09.09.2008
• lab: Wednesdays 12:00-13:30 (bi-weekly) in the computer pool, A5, starting from 10.09.2008
• practicum/project: Wednesdays 12:00-13:30 and 13:45-15:15 in the computer pool, A5, starting from 10.09.2008

To complete the courses a student must

• participate actively at the lecture and the lab
• participate actively at the practicum/internship

For the certificate of the first course, an additional (oral or written) exam must be passed. For the certificate of the practicum/internship, the final presentation of a software project will be evaluated.

Tentatively, the following topics will be dealt with in the lecture (subject to modifications):

1. Introduction to the Semantic Web/Web 2.0
2. XML
3. RDF
4. RDF/S
5. OWL
6. F-Logic

The primary reading material will be the book "Semantic Web: Grundlagen" von P. Hitzler, M. Krötzsch, S. Rudolph und Y. Sure. Additional literature will be announced as required in the lecture.

The practicum and the lab will enable the participants to apply the technologies presented in the lecture to different examples. In the beginning, a couple of  assignments will be solved. Later, the participants will devise a system based on the web services provided by amazon.com and implement it.

Tentatively, the following topics will be dealt with in the lab and practicum/internship (subject to modifications):

1. relational database systems (SQL)
2. XML (parsing transformations)
3. RDF (query languages, schemas, inference rules)
4. OWL (modelling principles, logical inference)

Experience with Java is obligatory for participation at the lab and the practicum/internship.

The following information is subject to change at short or without prior notice.

• 1. week:
  • Tuesday 09.09. (lecture): organizational issues / What is the Semantic Web? (Slides)
  • Wednesday 10.09 (lab / practicum): organizational issues / 1.  Assignment
    • Additional Material:
      • SQL-Interface-template: SQLresponse.zip
      • JSP in a very tiny nutshell (in english and in german) .
      • HTML-Tutorial: selfhtml (only german), W3Cschools html introduction
      • SQL instructions
      • MySQL-Reference (also in german)
      • Database: unidata_dump.sql.zip
• 2. week:
  • Wednesday 17.09 (lab / practicum): 2.  Assignment / Slides (projects) 
    
    • Additional Material:
      • XML version of the unidata database: german and english
      • Parsing examples: XSLT example, SAX emaple, DOM example
      • Validation: XML Validator, RDF Validator
      • RDF: RDF Primer, RDF/XML Syntax Specification, RDF Schema Vocabulary
      • Sesame: Sesame User Guide
      • project inspiration:
        • Semantic Web Challenge
        • Data: rdfdata.org, swoogle, watson
        • Further data: Amazon data (accessible by web services), Ebay data (accessible by web services)
• 3. week:
  • Tuesday 23.09. (lecture): XML (Slides)
  • Wednesday 24.09 (practicum)
• 4. week:
  • Wednesday 01.10 (practicum)
• 5. week:
  • Tuesday 07.10. (lecture): XML (Slides), RDF (Slides)
  • Wednesday 08.10. (lab/practicum): 3. Assignment (Schema Integration)/presentation of project ideas
    • Additional Material
      • Ontology
• 6. week:
  • Wednesday 15.10. (practicum)
• 7. week:
  • Tuesday 21.10. (lecture): RDF query languages (Slides), OWL (Slides)
  • Wednesday 22.10 (lab/practicum): 4. Assignment (Ontology Population) / Amazon/Ebay Web Services
    • Additional Material
      • Data:
        • university calendar of the university of Mannheim
        • university calendar of the university of Heidelberg
        • university calendar of the university of Karlsruhe
      • html parsers:
        • http://htmlparser.sourceforge.net/
        • http://sourceforge.net/projects/nekohtml
        • http://jerichohtml.sourceforge.net/doc/index.html
        • http://java-source.net/open-source/html-parsers/hotsax
        • ...
      • template for htmlparser: template.zip
• 8. week:
  • Wednesday 29.10. (practicum)
• 9. week:
  • Wednesday 05.11. (lab/practicum): 5. Assignment (RDF query languages)
    • Additional Material
      • culture example: culture.rdf, culture_data.rdf, admin.rdf
      • SeRQL chapter in the Sesame documentation
      • Slides for exercise 5.1 and 5.4
• 10. week:
  • Tuesday 11.11. (lecture): Logics (Slides)
    
  • Wednesday 12.11. (practicum): progress reports of the projects
• 11. week:
  • Tuesday 18.11. (lecture): OWL Semantics
  • Wednesday 19.11 (lab / practicum): 6. Assignment (OWL Modelling and Logics)
    • Additional Material
      • Ontology to be translated in exercise 6.4
      • Download Ontology Editor Protege at http://protege.stanford.edu/
      • Protege Tutorial
      • table with OWL abstract syntax and DL-Syntax
• 12. week:
  • Wednesday 26.11. (practicum)
    • Additional Material
      • helpful literature on Logics:
        • Appendix of the lecture book
        • Uwe Schoening: Logik fuer Informatiker (Amazon Link)
• 13. week:
  • Wednesday 03.12. (lab / practicum): 7. Assignment (OWL Reasoning)
    • Additional Material
      • Requirements for the project
      • Family Ontology
      • Pellet OWL Reasoning Example
      • OWL API Documentation (Tutorial and Javadoc): OWL API
• 14. week:
  
  • Tuesday 09.12. (lecture): F-Logic (Slides)
  • Wednesday 10.12 (lab / practicum): presentation of the projects

The written exam will take place on the 23rd of January 2009 at 10:00 o'clock. It will take place in room B1.01 in Building B6 (besides the Dekanat). If you want to attend the written exam please write an email to livia(at)informatik.uni-mannheim.de before the 15th of January 2009.

Do not forget to bring your student id card to the exam and please also take care that you have your matricle number available.

Questions about any kind of topic of the lecture, the lab or the practicum can be posed in the forum (link to the forum).

Students of the University of Mannheim can access the forum with their university account details. (click at "Anmelden" in the upper right corner). Students of other Universities need to write an e-mail with their name, university and study course to Livia Predoiu in order to get an account and the login information.

There is also a mailing list. You should subscribe at this mailing list as all kind of information will be sent via the mailing list. You can subscribe here:

https://mailman.uni-mannheim.de/mailman/listinfo/semanticweb

Please enter your first and last name in the box 'Name (optional)'. After subscription, your email adress will be activated by the moderator.