News

• Exam results - 7/9/2018.
  The results of the students who registered for the exam on Infostud will be uploaded (to Infostud) on September 20. Those students who do not want their grade to be uploaded have to send an email to prof. Rosati no later than September 19.
  The interested students will have the possibility to look at the exam corrections during the office hours of September 19 (14:30-16:00, room B216).
• The lectures for AY 2017/2018 were held in the second semester (from February 26 to June 1, 2018).
  Lecture schedule:
  • Monday, 11:00-13:00, via Ariosto 25, Room A3
  • Wednesday, 16:00-19:00, 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
   • Formalization of actions and successor state axioms in the Situation Calculus

Lectures

The lectures for AY 2017/2018 were held in the second semester (from February 26 to June 1, 2018).
Lecture schedule:

• Monday, 11:00-13:00, via Ariosto 25, Room A3
• Wednesday, 16:00-19, 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
• Final exercises on Knowledge Representation
• Part 5: Reasoning about actions:
  • Representing and reasoning about actions in the Situation Calculus
  • Exercise on representing actions in the Situation Calculus

Additional material

• Sebastian Rudolph. Foundations of Description Logics. Reasoning Web, 2011. http://aifb.kit.edu/images/1/19/DL-Intro.pdf
• Thomas Eiter, Giovambattista Ianni and Thomas Krennwallner. Answer Set Programming: A primer. Reasoning Web 2009. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221510765_Answer_Set_Programming_A_Primer
• Giovanni Grasso, Nicola Leone, and Francesco Ricca. Answer Set Programming: Language, Applications and Development Tools. Reasoning Web 2013. https://www.mat.unical.it/ricca/downloads/rr2013-tutorial.pdf

Exam

Remark: to pass the exam, every student has to present a practical project (homework) besides passing the written exam (see the next section on homework assignments).

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

Exam dates:

• June 13, 2018
• July 23, 2018
• September 7, 2018
• January 2019
• February 2019

As usual, before every exam date, students MUST reserve for the exam on Infostud. The reservation deadline is 3 or 4 days before the exam date.

• 1 exercise on DL (part 1)
• 1 exercise on Datalog/ASP (part 2)
• 1 exercise on Semantic Web, RDF, RDFS, SPARQL (part 4.1, 4.2, 4.3)
• 1 exercise on OWL (part 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7)
• 1 exercise on KR (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
• 1 exercise on reasoning about actions (part 5)

Text of past exams:

• June 15, 2015
• July 14, 2015
• June 14, 2016
• July 19, 2016
• September 5, 2016
• June 14, 2017
• July 21, 2017

Homework assignments

Every student MUST present a practical project besides passing the written exam. The project consists of creating and managing datasets/knowledge bases through KR-based tools.

Every project consists of:

1. downloading, installing and learning how to use a knowledge-based system, e.g.:
   • 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 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 students who did not give the presentation at the end of the course (May 30) must contact prof. Rosati by email to give the presentation.

Schedule and contents of past lectures

Link to the website of the 2016/2017 edition of this course