News

• Exam results - 17/2/2015.
  The results of the students who registered for the exam on Infostud will be uploaded (to Infostud) starting from March 6. Those students who do not want their grade to be uploaded have to send an email to prof. Rosati no later than March 5.
  The interested students will have the possibility of looking at the exam corrections during the office hours of March 3 (16:30-17:30, room B216).
• (10/6/2014) The material on reasoning about actions is available.
• (9/6/2014) The presentations of the practical homework will take place on June 24, 2014, 14:00, room B2.
• (2/6/2014) The final exercises on KR are available.
• (2/6/2014) The slides on the upper layers of the Semantic Web are available.
• (2/6/2014) The exercises on OWL are available.
• (2/6/2014) The slides on ontologies, OWL, and OWL profiles are available.
• (29/5/2014) The exercises on RDF are available.
• (29/5/2014) The exercises on Datalog and ASP are available.
• (13/5/2014) The slides on The RDF layer are available.
• (13/5/2014) The slides on Introduction to the Semantic Web are available.
• (13/5/2014) Added information on practical and theoretical homework.
• (24/4/2014) The material on Datalog and ASP is available.
• (25/3/2014) New lecture schedule:
  • Tuesday, 15:45-19, via Ariosto 25, Room A3
  • Thursday, 15:45-17:15, via Ariosto 25, Room B2
• (20/3/2014) The exercises on Description Logics are available.
• (18/3/2014) The material on Description Logics is available.
• The lectures for AY 2013/2014 are held in the second semester (February-May 2014).

Objectives

The goal of the course is to provide an introduction to knowledge representation and reasoning, and to focus on the current semantic technologies that are strongly based on knowledge representation and reasoning. In particular, the families of class-based and rule-based knowledge representaton formalisms will be presented, and reasoning techniques for such formalisms will be analyzed. Then, the course will introduce the standard semantic technologies based on the above knowledge representation formalism, in particular the RDF language, the OWL language, and the RIF language. Finally, the notion of action will be introduced and the main forms of reasoning about actions will be presented.

Preliminary program

1. Introduction to knowledge representation
2. Class-based formalisms
   • Description Logics
   • Reasoning in Description Logics
   • Description Logics vs. relational databases
3. Rule-based formalisms
   • Brief introduction to logic programming
   • Datalog
   • Reasoning in Datalog
   • Datalog vs. Description Logics
   • Datalog extensions
   • Datalog with negation
   • Answer Set Programming (ASP)
   • Reasoning in ASP
   • Comparison with SQL
4. Semantic technologies
   • Semantic Web
   • RDF, RDFS, SPARQL
   • Linked data
   • Ontologies
   • OWL
   • OWL profiles
   • Reasoning in OWL profiles
   • Query answering in OWL profiles
   • Building an OWL ontology
   • Rule Interchange Format
5. Reasoning about actions
   • Logics for actions
   • The Situation Calculus and the frame problem
   • Executability and projection
   • ConGolog programs over action theories and semantic services
   • Advanced forms of reasoning about actions and verification
   • Planning and synthesis

Course material

• Part 1: Description Logics
• Exercises on Description Logics
• Part 2: Datalog and Answer Set Programming
• Exercises on Datalog and Answer Set Programming
• Part 3: Semantic technologies:
  1. Introduction to the Semantic Web
  2. The RDF layer
  3. Exercises on RDF, RDFS; and SPARQL
  4. Ontologies, OWL, and OWL profiles
  5. Exercises on OWL
  6. The upper layers of the Semantic Web
• Part 4: Reasoning about actions
• Final exercises on Knowledge Representation

Exam

The written exam is a set of exercises and questions about all the course topics.

• 1 exercise on DL (part 1)
• 1 exercise on Datalog/ASP (part 2)
• 1 exercise on Semantic Web, RDF, RDFS, SPARQL (part 3.1, 3.2, 3.3)
• 1 exercise on OWL (part 3.4, 3.5)
• 1 exercise on KR (part 1, 2, 3)
• 1 exercise on reasoning about actions (part 4)

Remark: the exercise on reasoning about actions will be similar to the exercises that you can find in the additional material of the reasoning about actions slides:

• 1-FromBrachmanLevesque2004.pdf, exercises at page 301-303
• 2-FromReiter2001.pdf, exercises at page 41-44

Text of past exams:

• June 23, 2014 (text a)
• June 23, 2014 (text b)
• July 14, 2014
• September 18, 2014

Homework

Students (on a voluntary basis) may ask for a homework. The homework may be either practical or theoretical.

Practical homework:

The practical homework can be conducted by groups of 1, 2 or 3 students. It consists of:

1. downloading, installing and learning how to use one of the following KR/SW systems:
   • Protege
   • DLV
   • Jena
   • Virtuoso
   • Mastro
2. building and querying a small experimental dataset for the above chosen KR/SW system.

The student(s) must show the usage of such a tool during a brief presentation (10 minutes for single students, 15 minutes for 2/3 students).

The practical homework (PH) is evaluated from 0 to 3 points. The students then have to pass the written exam (WE), which is evaluated as usual up to 30 points. The final grade is obtained by summing PH with WE.

Every student (or group of students) who is interested in the practical homework has to send an email to prof. Rosati no later than May 23, 2014. The email must have subject: "KRST - practical homework request" and must contain name and last name of the student(s), system chosen, and brief information on the dataset that is going to be built (e.g., the domain of interest of the dataset).

The presentations of the practical homework took place on June 24, 2014, 14:00, room B2.

Theoretical homework:

The theoretical homework is individual. The purpose is to further study one of the course topics, by reading additional material (papers, book chapters, etc.) on the topic and making then an oral presentation on such a topic. The evaluation is also individually negotiated with the professor. The students interested in this homework are kindly requested to contact by email prof. Rosati, or prof. De Giacomo for the topics related to reasoning about actions, for more information (please write "KRST - theoretical homework" in the email subject).

There is no deadline for the theoretical homework (it can be assigned until the end of the academic year). However, the theoretical homework must be presented before taking the written exam.

The theoretical homework (TH) is also evaluated from 0 to 3 points and the final grade is obtained by summing TH with WE.

Lectures