News

• Exam results - 21/7/2017.
  The results of the students who registered for the exam on Infostud will be uploaded (to Infostud) starting from July 28. Those students who do not want their grade to be uploaded have to send an email to prof. Rosati no later than July 27.
  The interested students will have the possibility of looking at the exam corrections during the office hours of July 25 (16:30-18:00, room B216).
• Details about the homework have been added to this page (see below)
• The lectures for AY 2016/2017 are held in the second semester (from February 21 to May 25, 2017).
  Lecture schedule:
  • Tuesday, 14-16, via Ariosto 25, Room A4
  • Thursday, 16-19, via Ariosto 25, Room A3

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.

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. Knowledge representation and 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

Lectures

The lectures for AY 2016/2017 are held in the second semester (from February 21 to May 25, 2017).

Lecture schedule:

• Tuesday, 14-16, via Ariosto 25, Room A4
• Thursday, 16-19, via Ariosto 25, Room A3

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: SQL, DLs, Datalog and ASP: comparison
• Part 4: Semantic technologies:
  1. Introduction to the Semantic Web
  2. The RDF layer
  3. Exercises on RDF, RDFS, and SPARQL
  4. Ontologies and OWL
  5. OWL 2
  6. Exercises on OWL
  7. Exercises on OWL 2 profiles
  8. The upper layers of the Semantic Web
• Final exercises on Knowledge Representation
• Part 5: Reasoning about actions:
  • Representing and reasoning about actions in the Situation Calculus
  • Exercises on representing and reasoning about actions in the Situation Calculus

Exam

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

Exam dates:

• June 14, 2017
• July 21, 2017
• September 5, 2017
• January 2018
• February 2018

To participate in the exam, every student must register for the exam on Infostud.

Text of past exams:

• June 23, 2014 (text a)
• June 23, 2014 (text b)
• July 14, 2014
• September 18, 2014
• January 16, 2015
• February 17, 2015
• June 15, 2015
• July 14, 2015
• June 14, 2016
• July 19, 2016
• September 5, 2016

Homework assignments

Students (on a voluntary basis) may present practical projects during the course lectures. The projects consist of creating and managing datasets/knowledge bases through KR-based tools.

Every project can be conducted by a group of 1 or 2 students. It consists of:

1. downloading, installing and learning how to use one of the following KR/SW systems:
   • Protege
   • DLV
   • Jena
   • Virtuoso
   • Stardog
   • Mastro (Protege plug-in)
   • Ontop (Protege plug-in)
   (other tools/systems dealing with RDF, OWL, or Datalog/ASP can be used as well, the interested students have to contact prof. Rosati for more information)
2. building and querying a dataset for the above chosen KR/SW system. In alternative, it is possible to use an existing dataset. In both cases, the students must be aware of the structure and content of the dataset and be able to modify and query it in a proper way.

The student(s) must show the usage of such a tool during a brief presentation. The presentations will all take place during the last course lecture (approximately in the last week of May).

The interested students must contact prof. Rosati no later than April 30, 2017 (by email, or at the end of the lectures, or even during office hours on Tuesday, 16:30-18:00, via Ariosto 25).

Project presentations will take place during the lecture of May 25, 2017.

Schedule and contents of past lectures

Link to the website of the 2015/2016 edition of this course