This is the web page of the section "Semantic Web" of the course Elective in Software and Services (Complementi di software e servizi per la società dell'informazione).

News

Preliminary program

The Semantic Web is an initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which aims at overcoming some limitations of the current Web technologies in the representation of information. In particular, the goal of the Semantic Web is to extend the current Web technologies in order to allow for the explicit and machine-readable representation of the semantics of information and services on the Web, making it possible for Web applications to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. This section will provide a survey of the Semantic Web architecture and of the current enabling technologies for the Semantic Web. In particular, the section will present the current W3C standard languages for the Semantic Web:

1. the basic Semantic Web representation languages, i.e., RDF and RDF Schema;
2. the SPARQL query language for accessing RDF information sources;
3. the languages of the OWL family, which constitute the standard languages for the specification of ontologies in the Semantic Web.

Lectures

• Lecture 1: Tuesday, September 27, 2011
  • Introduction to the Semantic Web
• Lecture 2: Tuesday, October 4, 2011
  • The RDF layer: RDF
• Lecture 3: Tuesday, October 11, 2011
  • The RDF layer: RDFa, RDFS
• Lecture 4: Tuesday, October 18, 2011
  • The RDF layer: SPARQL, linked data, RDF/SPARQL tools
• Lecture 5: Tuesday, October 25, 2011
  • The RDF layer: creating and querying RDF datasets
• Lecture 6: Tuesday, November 8, 2011
  • The ontology layer: ontologies, Description Logics, OWL
• Lecture 7: Tuesday, November 15, 2011
  • The ontology layer: OWL, OWL 2, reasoning in OWL
• Lecture 8: Tuesday, November 22, 2011
  • The ontology layer: OWL 2 profiles, DL-Lite
• Lecture 9: Tuesday, November 29, 2011
  • The ontology layer: creating and querying OWL ontologies
• Lecture 10: Tuesday, December 6, 2011
  • The upper layers: rules, proof, trust

Slides

• Part 1 - Introduction to the Semantic Web (UPDATED ON 26/10/2011)
• Part 2 - The RDF layer (UPDATED ON 26/10/2011)
• Exercises on RDF and SPARQL (UPDATED ON 26/10/2011)
• Part 3 - The ontology layer 1: ontologies, Description Logics, and OWL
• Part 4 - The ontology layer 2: reasoning in OWL
• Part 5 - The ontology layer 3: OWL 2 profiles and DL-Lite
• Exercises on OWL
• Part 6 - The upper layers

Exam

The exam (written exam) consists of a set of questions and exercises on the course topics.

Exam dates:

• January 30, 2012
• February 20, 2012
• April 12, 2012 (see above)
• June 2012
• July 2012
• September 2012

Previous exams:

• Text 1
• Text 2

• See this page to find links to publicly available RDF tools
• See this page to find links to publicly available OWL/Description Logic tools